New and Old Routes of Portuguese Emigration
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IMISCOE Research Series Cláudia Pereira Joana Azevedo Editors New and Old Routes of Portuguese Emigration Uncertain Futures at the Periphery of Europe IMISCOE Research Series This series is the official book series of IMISCOE, the largest network of excellence on migration and diversity in the world. It comprises publications which present empirical and theoretical research on different aspects of international migration. The authors are all specialists, and the publications a rich source of information for researchers and others involved in international migration studies. The series is published under the editorial supervision of the IMISCOE Editorial Committee which includes leading scholars from all over Europe. The series, which contains more than eighty titles already, is internationally peer reviewed which ensures that the book published in this series continue to present excellent academic standards and scholarly quality. Most of the books are available open access. For information on how to submit a book proposal, please visit: http://www. imiscoe.org/publications/how-to-submit-a-book-proposal. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13502 Cláudia Pereira • Joana Azevedo Editors New and Old Routes of Portuguese Emigration Uncertain Futures at the Periphery of Europe Editors Cláudia Pereira Joana Azevedo Instituto Universitário de Lisboa Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Centro de Investigação e (ISCTE-IUL), Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia (CIES-IUL) Estudos de Sociologia (CIES-IUL) Observatório da Emigração Observatório da Emigração Lisbon, Portugal Lisbon, Portugal ISSN 2364-4087 ISSN 2364-4095 (electronic) IMISCOE Research Series ISBN 978-3-030-15133-1 ISBN 978-3-030-15134-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15134-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019. This book is an open access publication. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Foreword Although Portugal is a small nation at the edge of Europe, it has played a major and significant role in world history. This is largely because of its relationship to the sea, a point recently noted in a book by historian Malyn Newitt titled Emigration and the Sea: An Alternative History of Portugal and the Portuguese (Oxford University Press, 2015). The history of Portugal is a history of emigration and hence of deep involvement in processes of globalization and interconnectivity that have been in place since at least the fifteenth century. Despite this history, Portugal is rarely the first European country that the general public thinks about when it considers the movement of people across oceans. Further, although Portugal became a country of immigration during the latter decades of the twentieth century, its citizens are still emigrating, not only, as this volume notes, along old routes, but also along new ones. Yet, these more recent emigrants have been overlooked as scholarly attention was redirected toward the African, Asian, and Eastern Europeans who have moved to and settled in Portugal. Additionally, the new Portuguese flows of emigration are overshadowed by the refugee crisis on the European continent. As someone who began her academic career many decades ago by studying Portuguese immigrants in the United States, Canada, and France, I am delighted to see a renewed and fresh focus on this topic. This book approaches the “fourth wave” of Portuguese emigration with an interdisciplinary analytical framework, drawing together the work of economists, demographers, political scientists, geographers, sociologists and anthropologists. The contributing authors offer both top-down and bottom-up approaches, and draw variously on both qualitative and quantitative data. More importantly, as a collection, the chapters in this book address a range of significant and current questions in the study of migration, but through a Portuguese lens and a twenty-first-century lens. As a result, the Portuguese experience is brought into and engages with a broader comparative migration experience. For example, there is a large and growing literature on international care work and consequently of the gendered dimensions of migration. Some of this research focuses on nurses from developing countries and the global south (India, the v vi Foreword Caribbean, and the Philippines) who find employment in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. In the Pereira and Azevedo volume we discover, in the chapter written by Cláudia Pereira, that Portuguese nurses are now also involved in this movement, finding employment in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. This repre- sents a new kind of emigratory flow out of Portugal of a highly skilled population that has faced difficulties in securing employment in the home country. Additional chapters in this volume (by Teixeira Lopes and by Delicado) highlight other highly skilled emigrants who are leaving Portugal, something much less common several decades ago when I first began to study Portuguese emigration. This is partly a func- tion of the new positionality of Portugal as a member of the European community and hence party to the free movement of labor within the continent—something that was not possible 40 years ago when I first arrived in France to study Portuguese immigrant women. Similarly, there are male Portuguese migrants who, unlike their predecessors of a generation ago for whom work was only available in construction and in factories, have been able to establish themselves as entrepreneurs running restaurants and hotels and other small businesses. The topic of immigrant entrepre- neurship is of major concern in migration studies. To have new information about how Portuguese migrants engage this form of employment, as well as the obstacles and opportunities they confront, adds not only to our understanding of the Portuguese immigrant experience broadly speaking, but also to our understanding of how immi- grants impact the small business sector in various host countries. And yet, despite these new flows and new forms of employment, there are still Portuguese migrants performing jobs in the more traditional sectors of the labor market, as illustrated by the chapter written by João Queirós about Portuguese construction workers in Spain and France. The temporary and circular nature of this employment in the present day reminded me of the stories I heard from old-timers in a northern Portuguese village who had gone to work as stonemasons in Spain in the early part of the twen- tieth century. Comparisons can be drawn with past flows in previous waves of Portuguese emigration. Additional chapters in this book address other important dimensions of the immigrant experience generally speaking—for example, the nature and patterns of return migration; the challenges of conflicting and multiple identities and the struggle for a sense of belonging in both the country of origin and the country of destination; and the participation of immigrants in homeland politics. But equally, the book helps us to understand some dimensions of emigration that are unique to Portugal because of its history—for example, discussions of emigration to Angola that is framed by a postcolonial relationship or of the flows to and from Brazil in the more contemporary period that are shaped by the powerful commonalities of a shared language. In my book Anthropology and Migration (2003), I attempted to frame the generally ignored Portuguese case in relation to important theoretical and empirical dimensions of emigration and immigration. New and Old Routes of Portuguese Foreword vii Emigration; Uncertain Futures at the Periphery of Europe has a similar goal, effectively challenging us to understand Portugal’s deep and changing history of emigration and to recognize the extensive and sustained participation of its people in the