Theorising Transnational Migration

The Status Paradox of Migration

Boris Nieswand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415584555
• eBook ISBN: 9781136682018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Societal transformations have recently stimulated political debates and policies on the integration of migrants and minorities in most Western European countries. While transnational migration studies have documented migrants' cross-border activities there have been few empirically grounded efforts to theorise these developments in the framework of integration and status theory.

Based on a case study of Ghanaian migrants, this book seeks to understand integration processes and develops a theorem of the status paradox of migration which explores the interaction between migrants' integration into the receiving country and the maintained inclusion into the sending society. It describes a characteristic problem for a large class of labour migrants from the global south who gain status in the sending countries by simultaneously losing it in the receiving countries of migration. This transnational dynamic of status attainment, which goes along with specifically national forms of status inconsistency, is what is called the status paradox of migration.

By bringing together two modes of national status incorporation within one framework, the status paradox provides an innovative perspective on migration processes and demonstrates the usefulness of a transnationalist integration theory. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of migration, transnationalism, politics, sociology and anthropology.

1 Migration and Society

Scientific approaches to migration in many cases include implicit assumptions about the character of a given society within which or across whose borders migration occurs. I will argue that the way the relationship between a society, its members and their culture is imagined has a significant impact on how migration is conceptualised, and vice versa. The connection between the employed notion of society and the theorisation of migration will be examined for a selection of sociological and anthropological approaches. Moreover, transnational migration studies, which are the paradigm this study feels affiliated with, will be contextualised within the broader field of migration studies in order to work out its specificity. The explication and the comparison of different methodological frameworks for the study of migration contribute to a clearer understanding and, perhaps, a relativisation of some of the antagonisms in the field of migration studies. This concerns in particular the relationship between the approaches which argue within the nation-state paradigm of society, and those which employ a world societal framework.

Niklas Luhmann in a encyclopedia article defined society as ‘the most comprehensive system of human coexistence’ (in Fuchs-Heinritz, et al. 1994: 235). Referring to the numerous controversies which have emerged about society’s more specific qualities he added, ‘There is no agreement on further qualifying characteristics’.¹ Luhmann’s quotation reflects that the concept of society is an important background assumption which shapes social Scientific research agendas rather than a clearly distinct object that could be empirically described or theoretically defined in a simple way.

However, despite these difficulties in defining and delimiting society, it appears complicated (if not impossible) to conceptualise social phenomena, in particular migration, without referring to society and affirming some implicit assumptions about its character. The importance of ‘society’ for migration studies is connected to the fact that social theory regards the members of a society as its constituting parts.² As migration changes the composition of ‘the personnel’ of a society, it also changes the society.

The nation-state had developed into the dominant political form of statehood during the late eighteenth and through the nineteenth centuries and consequently became the paradigmatic imaginary of society in the social sciences. Therefore, students of migration in Europe and North America normally examined the effects of migration on national societies.

In Africa the situation was different. Since most sub-Saharan African states became independent only after the late 1950s and the nation-state was and is in several regions not very strongly developed, it was much more the binary of modernity and tradition which influenced the study and representation of migration. In particular those migrants received academic attention who crossed the border between ‘traditional society’ and ‘modern society’.

However, within both analytical frameworks, it was primarily intersocietal migration which was studied. In Western Europe and North America, intersocietal migration referred to citizens of one nation-state who had migrated to another. Consequently, the ‘foreigner’ became ‘the prototype of the stranger’³ (Hahn 1997: 155), and migration research became to a large extent ‘foreigner research’. Since the major social differentiations in Africa were expected to separate ‘modern’ from ‘traditional’ societies, it was the migrant from the rural ‘traditional societies’ living and working in the enclaves of the ‘modern society’, such as the big cities and the centres of the export economy, who coined the dominant image of the stranger. In both cases society was methodologically conceptualised as a relatively unitary and integrated whole, in which the respective type of migrant—the ‘foreigner in the nation-state’ or ‘the tribesman in the city’—appeared as an alien object, whose behaviour and relationship to the receiving society attracted academic attention.

As I will elaborate in more detail below, transnational migration studies and other approaches which have emerged within the globalisation discourse deviate from these notions of society and argue for less territorialised concepts of society. Giving up the clear methodological inside/outside differentiation, which had instructed the selection of paradigmatic cases of migrants in the two mentioned approaches, affects the general conceptualisation of migration and integration.

MIGRATION AND THE NATION-STATE

For several decades, in particular U.S. American migration studies were dominated by assimilationism. Its foundation as a Scientific theory goes back to the sociologists of the Chicago School, who started to study immigrants in urban settings in the 1920s. Robert E. Park developed the so-called race relation circle in which he described successive stages of immigrants’ social and cultural adjustment to the ‘racial’ groups of the receiving society (cf. Park and Burgess 1969 [1921]). The race relation circle aimed at a general social theory of cultural contact and ethnic relations beyond the more narrow focus of immigration to the United States (Park 1950).⁴ The stages, which ethnic groups that encounter each other were expected to go through within the race relation circle, were social contact, competition, conflict, accommodation and, finally, assimilation (Park 1950 [1926]; Park and Burgess 1969 [1921]).

While accommodation referred to the establishment of peaceful inter-group relations, assimilation implied the adoption of the majority’s collective memories and identities by the minority. The race relation circle was considered a slow and gradual process of which the migrants themselves were only partly aware. Whether the social and cultural adaptation was considered to be symmetric, i.e. affecting both groups, or asymmetric, i.e. primarily affecting the minority, was left open by Park and his colleagues (Park and Burgess 1969 [1921]: 360). Moreover, they did not indicate how probable a finalisation of the assimilation process was in their view. In his article Our Racial Frontier on the Pacific, Park (1950 [1926]: 151) spoke of a tendency towards assimilation. In a later writing (Park 1950 [1937]: 194), he stated that assimilation was one of three possible outcomes of the contact between racially distinct groups.⁵

Although assimilation was considered functional for enhancing the internal cohesion of a society, pressure exerted on the minority by the majority to adapt to the standards of the dominant ‘race’ was considered dysfunctional. It was expected to disturb the gradual and unconscious dynamic of assimilation (Park and Burgess 1969 [1921]: 364–65).

After Park, the rise of the theory of assimilation was corroborated by the U.S. American experience of immigration until the 1960s. According to the dominant representation of the U.S. migration history the country was depicted as a ‘melting pot of nations’. In fact, many of the European migrants who came to the United States between the 1880s and the 1920s were assimilated to the American mainstream during the two World Wars, when home ties often had been cut and pressure had increased for siding with the ‘new home country’. Moreover, political changes of the U.S. immigration regime led to a reduction of the influx of new immigrants who could reactivate transnational social ties (Alba and Nee 2003: 126–27).

In this framework, the assimilation approach aimed at examining and predicting the adaptation of immigrants to the mainstream of U.S. society. At the core of this view was the idea that the integration of a national society increased if its members were culturally and ethnically more or less homogeneous. Migrants, as members of another society, were perceived as ‘foreign elements’ whose behaviour could possibly affect the cohesion of the receiving society as a whole.

From the very beginning, the theory of assimilation had to deal with empirical counterevidence. Certain kinds of religious and racial differences, in particular those between white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), Afro-Americans, Catholics and Jews remained persistent. One way of dealing with the problem within the discourse of assimilationism was to temporalise the dissolution of difference within a cross-generational model according to which only the third generation of immigrants was expected to be socially and culturally assimilated (Galitzi 1929; Hitti 1924; Duncan 1933).

Additionally, the idea was developed that multiple melting pots existed, which were differentiated by religion and ‘race’ (Kennedy 1944, 1952; Herberg 1956). According to this view, immigrants were expected to assimilate to one of several ethno-cultural segments of the U.S. American population. This way, the idea of assimilation was adapted to the model of a plural society with stable ethnic, cultural and religious differentiations.

A refined version of assimilation theory was presented by Milton Gordon in his book Assimilation in American Life (1964). He developed a multidimensional concept of assimilation around the two theoretical key variables of structural assimilation and cultural assimilation (acculturation).⁶

Structural assimilation referred to a process of social integration in the primary groups of the dominant segment of society, indicated, for instance, by friendship relations with members of the core society or residence in a ‘white middle class’ living quarter. Structural assimilation was central for Gordon and entailed other forms of assimilation, like identification with the society, intermarriage and acculturation (Gordon 1964: 80–81). Under cultural assimilation or acculturation Gordon understood the process of adapting to the cultural standards of the receiving country. While he perceived (partial) acculturation as an inevitable effect of the exposure to the receiving society, he considered structural assimilation as contingent. In his view, prejudices and discrimination against immigrants and their descendants by members of the core society were particularly obstructive to structural assimilation.

Despite the factual existence of ethno-economic segmentation, so-called ‘eth-classes’, for Gordon, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants formed the core of the society, at which the other groups converged culturally and socially. Although he was sceptical about the success of the dissolution of the ‘eth-classes’, assimilation nevertheless remained the standard by which he evaluated empirical deviation (Gordon 1975: 85).

Different from the expectations of the 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a global increase in the number of so-called ethnic and ‘racial’ conflicts. In this situation it appeared more problematic to conceptualise ethnic and cultural difference as a mere residue, which was destined to die away (cf. Gordon 1975: 85). Instead, ethnicity became increasingly interpreted as a relatively persistent pattern of internal differentiation of ‘modern societies’. In this context, some of the core assumptions of assimilationism became criticised. It was questioned, on the one hand, whether assimilationism provided an empirically adequate description of group relations and, on the other hand, whether it was legitimate to declare the assimilation of ethnic others a politically desirable goal.

Critical authors objected that the normative ideal of assimilation was an ideology which legitimated the economic, social and cultural dominance of the WASP segment over less privileged groups of the society (Kymlicka 2003 [1995]: 62). In particular, representatives of the civil rights movements of the 1960s in the United States depicted the demand for conformity with the white mainstream population as an illegitimate means of political oppression.

One of the most prominent contributions to migration studies of this period, which questioned the empirical adequacy of the model of assimilation, was Glazer and Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot (1963). They argued for the case of New York that factually no single core culture existed to which immigrants could adapt, because the U.S. American urban society had become polycentric and pluralistic. Therefore, the idea of the United States as a melting pot had to be adapted to a more complex empirical situation. As we have seen above, the more sophisticated models of assimilation, which were developed by Kennedy, Gordon and others, took into consideration that the U.S. American society was in actual fact culturally and socially not homogenous. Nevertheless, the crucial point was that social homogeneity remained the normative benchmark of assimilationism. Moreover, assimilationists, as Gordon (1975) himself later admitted, did not develop a notion of power by which existing asymmetries and patterns of segmentation could be described in critical terms.

On a more theoretical level, the critique of assimilationism reflected the fact that the discourse on society shifted from an emphasis on homogeneity, equality, consensus and functional equilibrium to an emphasis on internal diversity, power differentials and conflict during the 1960s and the 1970s (Dahrendorf 1959; Rex 1961). As a result, the concept of ethnicity, which became a major idiom in which to speak about heterogeneity, power and conflict in complex societies, moved from the margins of the theory of modern society to its centre (Hannerz 1974; Esman 1977; Gans 1979; Portes and Manning 1986) and the concept of assimilation became discredited as ideological and simplistic.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the pluralist discourse on society culminated in the political model of multiculturalism (Chicago Cultural Studies Group 1992; Cohn-Bendit and Schmid 1992; Taylor 1994; Kymlicka 2003 [1995]). Charles Taylor’s The Politics of Recognition (1994) gave this discourse a philosophical underpinning. Although it is not representative for multiculturalist discourses in a statistical sense, in his work some of the theoretical particularities of multiculturalism are more developed and clearly formulated than in other works.

Taylor points out that political liberalism is based on a norm of indifference towards the culture of a person or a group. In order to avoid discrimination and to guarantee the equal treatment of all citizens, culture was considered legitimate as a private affair but not as something that should make a difference in terms of how individuals and groups are treated by the state. As a consequence, as Taylor argues, liberal states face difficulties to find adequate ways of dealing with the internal cultural diversity of plural societies, in particular in cases in which questions of cultural self-determination cause conflicts between the majority and a minority. According to Taylor (1994: 27–29) these problems are deeply rooted in the modern notion of the individual. Modern persons are not any longer defined by an objectified and externally ascribed position within a stratified society, as they were in Europe for a long time, but perceive, above all, their ‘authentic inner selves’ as a central referent of the determination of their identity. In order to develop an unproblematic relationship to their selves, individuals depend on the public recognition of these aspects of their person, which they perceive as central for determining their identity. Persons who are not recognised in these respects by others are not able to develop a consistent self-image. Therefore, according to Taylor, the political control of the recognition of identity claims has become a crucial power resource and field of political struggle in ‘modern societies’: ‘Non-recognition or misrecognition [of identity] can inflect harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being’ (Taylor 1994: 25).

Since recognition affects the core of personhood, Taylor emphasised that cultural minorities face problems of a special nature, which also require a special treatment by the state (Taylor 1994: 39). Although the legitimacy of modern statehood is based to a great extent on its strong equality norm, it is, according to him, incapable of protecting minorities’ rights adequately against the power of the majority. In order to allow cultural minorities a limited form of collective self-determination, the state must, as Taylor argues, at some points break with the liberal principle of difference-blindness (Taylor 1994: 51–60). In this sense, multiculturalism is a political theory that stresses the legitimacy of culturally founded minority rights and offers an alternative to liberalism for organising the coexistence of ethnic groups in a society.⁷

Taylor’s paradigmatic example was the francophone minority in Canada, whose collective identity claims are particularly linked to the public use of French. The linguistic hegemony of the English-speaking majority would have implied the risk that French as a communication language died out and the collective identity of the Francophone minority suffered substantial damage. He argued that the right of the minority to maintain their culture could only be guaranteed if the rights of the majority, in respect to the public use of the English language, were limited to some extent, as was done in the Canadian province of Quebec. Therefore, the collective rights of the minority to recognition of their particularity could only be protected by restricting the majority’s rights in a locally limited area.

The core idea of multiculturalism is that equality and justice between cultural groups can be increased by recognising collective cultural differences⁸ and by providing societal institutions for their protection. Thereby, multiculturalism can be understood as a political model of anti-assimilationism.⁹ The peaceful coexistence of culturally and ethnically distinct groups is not only perceived as an empirical reality, as in the case of Gordon’s understanding of assimilationism, but also as a desirable goal. Nevertheless, both models of assimilationism and multiculturalism perceive the nation-state as the self-evident unit in which cultural and ethnic difference between populations is recognised and processed.

In critical terms the role of ethnicity in modern societies was examined within the framework of ‘racialisation’ (Rex 1970; Bukow and Llaryora 1988; Balibar and Wallerstein 1990; Bukow 1992; Miles 1993a, 1993b, 1998; Rex and Mason 1994 [1986]; Solomos 1994 [1986]); Hall 1996 [1980]; Barot and Bird 2001). A classical text in this tradition is Oliver C. Cox’s book Class, Caste and Race (1948), in which he explained the significance of the category of ‘race’ by its functionality for organising and disguising exploitation in capitalist societies. The authors of the 1970s and 1980s who referred to Cox tried in different ways to soften Cox’s rather orthodox Marxist argument (Gabriel and Ben-Tovim 1978; Solomos 1994 [1986]; Hall 1996 [1980]). One of the most important authors within this debate was Robert Miles, who coined the concept of ‘racialisation’. He combined social constructivist and Marxist ideas in order to demonstrate how the category of ‘race’ was created in an interplay of political, scientific and economic factors. Although Miles generally emphasised (1993a: 40) that ‘race...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Migration and Society
• 2 Ghana and its Migrants
• 3 Processes of Localisation
• 4 Processes of Transnationalisation
• 5 The Status Paradox of Migration
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index