The History of Migration in Europe
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The History of Migration in Europe

Francesca Fauri, Francesca Fauri

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eBook - ePub

The History of Migration in Europe

Francesca Fauri, Francesca Fauri

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About This Book

The History of Migration in Europe belies several myths by arguing, for example, that immobility has not been the "normal" condition of people before the modern era. Migration (far from being an income-maximizing choice taken by lone individuals) is often a household strategy, and local wages benefit from migration. This book shows how ssuccesses arise when governments liberalize and accompany the international movements of people with appropriate legislation, while failures take place when the legislation enacted is insufficient, belated or ill shaped.

Part I of this book addresses mainly methodological issues. Past and present migration is basically defined as a cross-cultural movement; cultural boundaries need prolonged residence and active integrationist policies to allow cross-fertilization of cultures among migrants and non-migrants. Part II collects chapters that examine the role of public bodies with reference to migratory movements, depicting a series of successes and failures in the migration policies through examples drawn from the European Union or single countries. Part III deals with challenges immigrants face once they have settled in their new countries: Do immigrants seek "integration" in their host culture? Through which channels is such integration achieved, and what roles are played by citizenship and political participation? What is the "identity" of migrants and their children born in the host countries?

This text's originality stems from the fact that it explains the complex nature of migratory movements by incorporating a variety of perspectives and using a multi-disciplinary approach, including economic, political and sociological contributions.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2014
ISBN
9781317678281
Edition
1
Part I
Who are the migrants and what is their impact?
1 Quantifying and qualifying cross-cultural migrations in Europe since 1500
A plea for a broader view1
Leo Lucassen and Jan Lucassen
Introduction
Although migration is the talk of the town, both in the public sphere and in academia, so far historians and social scientists have failed to come up with generally accepted definitions and typologies to measure and qualify migration in the long run. Whereas some (e.g. national statistical agencies) concentrate on people who cross international borders, others – guided by the concerns of politicians and policy makers – limit themselves to ‘problematic’ groups, either socially, culturally or a mix of both. In Europe this has led to a myopic view that privileges migrants from Muslim countries, whereas in the United States Hispanics attract the most attention (Zolberg and Woon, 1999). That conspicuous migrants need not always come from afar is shown by the problematization of Zimbabwean workers in South Africa (Wentzel et al., 2006; Crush and Tavera, 2010), or internal migrants who have flocked in great numbers to large cities within large empires such as Russia and China (Siegelbaum and Moch, 2014; Whyte, 2010; Shen, 2014).
These diverging and partial definitions of what migration is make structured comparisons through space and time extremely difficult, if not impossible. We therefore have great trouble in assessing the rate of migration in different societies and time periods. As a consequence, questions as to whether some societies are more mobile than others, or whether in the current world we have indeed reached the zenith of spatial mobility, as many assume, cannot be answered satisfactorily. Scholars are even divided about such fundamental questions as to what constitutes a migratory step, let alone what impact such steps have on both migrants and the societies where they settle. As a result there is no agreement on key questions such as whether early modern societies were indeed less mobile than modern ones; whether we can compare current illegal African migrants in Spain to Bretons moving to Paris in the nineteenth century; and whether the mass migrations to Manchuria after 1860 are principally different from the Atlantic mass migrations to North America (Moch, 2012; McKeown, 2004. For North America, see Taylor, 2002).
This messy state of affairs, at least in analytical terms, explains partially why migration does not play a key role in larger debates on the long term determinants of economic growth, labour relations, inequality and social and cultural changes of human societies (Van Zanden, 2009; Morris, 2013; Putterman and Weil, 2010; Manning, 2013). Instead the phenomenon is largely reduced to a “problem” of low skilled and culturally alien newcomers who have to be assimilated or integrated by nation states. This leaves out the high skilled, temporary organizational migrants (those working for internationally operating organizations such as churches, states, NGOs and companies) and internal migrants. It is this myopic migration-as-a-problem framework produced by states and societies that dominates migration studies and severely limits our possibilities to study and understand the causes and effects of human migrations.
Although many students have suggested definitions, typologies and methods, historians and social scientists cherish their own idiosyncrasies and approaches or simply reproduce prevailing policy categories. This is partly explained by different research agendas and questions,2 levels of analysis, and various forms of methodological nationalism and presentism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2003), but it is also nourished by an unwillingness and an understandable but unjustified fear regarding too broad generalizations. These objections, however, have not restrained migration historians from publishing all kinds of wide-ranging and even global overviews, with mostly implicit (but mutually inconsistent) definitions of migration.
We think that many of the fears of, and aversion to, a uniform definition of migration are unwarranted and that they need not necessarily lead to reductionism and meaningless levels of aggregation. Instead of harking back to a naive and outdated form of structuralism, following Nancy Green we propose a ‘post-structural structuralism’ (Green, 1997), which combines explicit research designs and definitions with nuanced, layered, contextual, and culturally embedded historical research.
In this chapter we propose a method and typology that uses a much broader definition of human mobility and that helps us to make sense of the varied historical experience by allowing us to compare migrations on a global and historical scale. The model has been developed on the basis of migrations in Europe between 1500 and 2000, but is also applicable on a global scale (Lucassen and Lucassen, 2014b). The aim of this approach is not only to contribute to discussions about levels of migration and mobility in different parts of the world before and after the industrial revolution, but more importantly to better understand the effect different forms of migration have on social, cultural, and economic change.
Migration and mobility: definitions and concepts
The main reason for the wide range of migration definitions is the reliance on sources produced by states, which stem from their interest in certain types of migration. Thus France in the early nineteenth century created an administrative system that enabled bureaucrats to follow the residential moves of draftees until their mid-forties, so that they could be mobilized if necessary (Farcy and Faure, 2003; Lucassen, 1987). Empires like Russia (before and after 1917), Tokugawa Japan, and Maoist China or apartheid South Africa, also monitored internal migrations, for both economic and political reasons.3 With the rise of the nation state, crossing national boundaries and the wish to distinguish between citizens and aliens became by far the most dominant criteria relating to migration (Torpey, 2000; Caplan and Torpey, 2001; Fahrmeir, 2007; McKeown, 2008). The idea that one’s own citizens should enjoy preferential social, economic and political rights, but also that citizens abroad should be protected against unfair treatment (Gabaccia, 2012; Green and Weil, 2007), explains the rise of what Gerard Noiriel so succinctly called “la tyrannie du national” (Noiriel, 1991).
The gaze of the state has proved hugely influential in the way scholars have studied migration and this has privileged some definitions over others. States defined “migration”, subsequently counted “migrants”, and the resulting statistical data have determined the categories used by historians and social scientists. At the same time scholars were lured away from basic questions regarding the distance travelled, the type of borders people crossed, the intention of the move, and the time spent away from home. Because state definitions loom heavily, “real” migration is often juxtaposed to “only” spatial mobility, assuming that “real” migrants travel over long distances, cross international (or even intercontinental) boundaries, and have the aim to take root at destination, or at least stay away for many years, leading to standard distinctions as shown in Table 1.1.
Although within the field of migration history there is no communis opinio about these binary oppositions, most scholars abide by the conventional definition of “real migrants”. When it comes to distance, for example, most migration scholars prefer national (or even continental) boundaries over local ones. And this explains the neglect of most internal migrations, both in Europe and Asia, as is demonstrated by the invisibility of tens of millions of intra-Asian migrants in studies on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (McKeown, 2004). Second, little attention is paid to temporary movements, such as seasonal labour, the migration of domestics from villages to cities, or that of tramping artisans (Lucassen, 1987; Moch, 1992, 2007; Ehmer, 2011). Consequently, in most mainstream overviews of migration, temporary and small-scale moves are conspicuously lacking and often left to geographers and (historical) demographers (Lee, 1966; Lawton, 1968; Zelinsky, 1971; Grigg, 1977; Oshiro, 1984; Chang, 1996; Fan and Huang, 1998; Pooley and Turnbull, 1998; Rosental, 1999; Van Poppel et al., 2004; Kok, 2007). The underlying assumption is that “real” migrants move with the aim to settle somewhere else for good, preferably in a faraway country. Such assumptions are in line with the nation state paradigm that assumes a fixed membership and views migration as an exemption to the sedentary rule. In the case that people do move, this would involve a painful process of uprooting and subsequently rerooting.4
Table 1.1 Conventional binary oppositions between migrants and movers
Real migrants (migration) Other movers (mobility)
Distance (geographical)
Long
Short
Border crossing
International/
intercontinental
Internal (municipal, regional, provincial, federal state)
Intention
Final stay at destination
Return to origin in short or long run (sojourners)
Time
Long term
Short term (seasonal, multi-annual labour migrants)
New social ties
High (at least in the long run)
Low (social and cultural isolation in gated communities)
Class
Low
High (e.g. expats) and low (e.g. Gypsies)
Power
Migrants who join and follow the rules
Migrants who come as invaders and set the rules
Agency
Free
Coerced (slaves) or prescribed (expats)
Source: Lucassen et al., 2014a.
The often implicit assumption seems to be that migration, in contrast to mobility, has a much larger cultural impact on both the migrants and the societies in which they settle, leading to conflicts, integration problems, or, more positively, to social and cultural change. This explains why nowadays in Western Europe, many scholars study the migration and settlement process of Moroccans, Turks, Algerians and other postcolonial migrants, but ignore people coming from neighbouring countries or with high skills (such as Japanese) (see, e.g. Crul and Mollenkopf, 2012). Germans in the Netherlands or French in the United Kingdom in our current era are normally not considered as “real” migrants, because their culture is assumed to be more or less similar to that of the natives. Added to these considerations are policy definitions that tend to privilege lower class migrants who would cause social problems over highly educated ones, defined as “expats” (Hanerz, 1990; Sassen, 1991; Salt, 1992; Smith and Favell, 2006; Favell, 2008; Green, 2009; Bickers, 2010; Blower, 2011; Bade et al., 2011; Fechter and Walsh, 2012; Van Bochove, 2012).
Next, there is a strong tendency to overlook involuntary migrations, which has resulted in the exclusion of the forced shipment of 12 million African slaves across the New World from the mainstream Atlantic migration story.5 Furthermore, Asian migrants – if noticed at all – (in the past as well as in the present) are often assumed to move in some form of bondage, whether as labourers or through trafficking. The same is true for prisoners of war and inmates of concentration camps. There is an implicit assumption that migrants have less power than the people they join and therefore have to adapt or assimilate. This explains why Europeans who ventured into Asia and Africa from the fifteenth century onwards, or the Spaniards who conquered Latin America, are often not considered as migrants.
Finally, it is remarkable that migrants who display extremely mobile behaviour, not with the aim of staying but as a consequence of their profession, such as travelling artisans, seasonal workers, sailors and soldiers, are also frequently excluded from migration histories, as they do not fit the “from A to B and then stay” format. However, their geographical mobility often had a great impact on the migrants themselves, those they (temporarily) joined and those to whom they eventually returned (Sanborn, 2005; Zürcher, 2013). Take the example of John Smith from Lincolnshire. Born at the end of the sixteenth century, he first fought in the Netherlands, after which he joined the Austrian forces fighting in Hungary against the armies of the Ottoman Empire. When he was taken prisoner in Romania he made it to Austria, after which he left for Virginia in the autumn of 1607 (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012, p. 21). However, few historians, including those from whom we borrowed this petite histoire, would class John Smith as a migrant. This mix of state preoccupations and other culturally and ideologically determined associations with the term “migrant” has divided and fragmented the field dramatically and stands in the way of a more fundamental understanding of human migrations.
The opposition between “real” migration and mobility is the result of highly stylized post hoc and teleological constructions of much more intricate human spatial and social behaviour. Two major difficulties stand out. First, the difference between intention and result: migrants may have the intention to leave for good, but for all kinds of reasons return after shorter or longer periods. The opposite is also true; some move multiple times and finally return after decades (Brettell, 1986; Cinel, 1991; Morawska, 1991; Wyman, 1993, 2001; Reeder, 2003; Alexander, 2005). And in the case of sojourners it may even take generations.6 A good example of the often considerable disparity between intention and result is that of migrants who moved within colonial circuits, such as the Dutch or English empires (Bosma, 2007a, 2007b; Feldman, 2007; Harper and Constantine, 2010; Bickers, 2010), but also informal empires such as the American since the late nineteenth and the Japanese empire in the first half of the twentieth century (Gabaccia, 2012; Young, 1998; Uchida, 2011; see also Lucassen, Osamu and Shimada, 2014). Migrants in colonial circuits travelled thousands of miles, but mostly with t...

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