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INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION and SOCIAL THEORY Karen O'reilly View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Loughborough University Institutional Repository This version submitted 30 October 2011 Prior to final editing by publisher INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION AND SOCIAL THEORY Karen O’Reilly 1 Chapter One Introduction: International Migration and Social Theory Chapter Two Practice Theory: A framework for International Migration Research Chapter Three Theories and Perspectives in Migration Chapter Four Lifestyle Migration: British Migration to Spain’s Coastal Areas Chapter Five Labour Migration: Mexican labour migration to the United States Chapter Six Domestic Labour Migration: Filipina Domestic Labour Migration to Hong Kong Chapter Seven Refugees and Forced migration: Refugee children in the United Kingdom Chapter Eight Conclusion and Summary of Key Points 2 Acknowledgements This book has taken a few years to write and it has sometimes been a painful process. It has also been an enlightening and (finally) satisfying one, and for that I thank all those great minds and conscientious personalities that together contributed the body of work without which this would be nothing. As with all such projects, there are numerous individuals I need to thank and I am bound to forget to mention someone who has been vital to my intellectual or personal sanity. So, you know who you are and I thank you! I would especially like to thank Michaela Benson, who provides me with fun and laughter as well as intellectual sustenance. Thanks also go to Maggie O’Neill for her recommendations for Chapter Seven. Even though I have not been able to include much discussion of her book, Asylum, Migration and Community, I nevertheless highly recommend it to readers, especially because she says ‘processes of integration, belonging and community formation are complex and include structural, agentic, relational, and psychosocial aspects’. Iris Wigger and Daniel Chernilo helped me without even realising it, because they are both colleagues and scholars of nations and nationalism. I have truly benefitted from working with such a great Sociology team at Loughborough. Other migration scholars I have had the pleasure to work with or meet at conferences have contributed in various ways, mainly by being enthusiastic and intelligent people who enjoy sharing ideas. I particularly mention Caroline Oliver, Mari Korpela, Catherine Trundle, Joaquin Rodes, Klaus Schriewer, Vicente Rodriguez and other members of the lifestyle migration hub. The four anonymous academic reviewers of the first draft were incredibly thorough and generous of their time and energies. The editorial team at Palgrave has been exceptionally patient and I especially thank Anna Reeve for commenting on drafts with such enthusiasm and vigilance. Thanks to the ESRC for funding various of my own migration research projects, and to the many individuals who let me into their lives to do research on migration. The book owes massive thanks to Rob Stones for his help, support, kindness, and especially his intellectual insights. Finally, my family continues to show me endless patience, and I love the way they all humour me when I get totally absorbed in what they probably think is a complete waste of time. The book is dedicated, as always, to Trevor. 3 Chapter One International Migration and Social Theory Introduction International migration affects millions of people across the globe every day, as migrants and as non- migrants. It can arise as a result of rupture in people’s lives, it can cause upheavals within communities, and it can reunite families. It can provide much-needed resources for sending and receiving countries, or it can put great strain on destinations or shatter the economies and daily lives where migrants leave. It can lead to emotional individual, media and policy responses. It can be framed with the rhetoric of floods, tides, and influxes, or it can be warmly welcomed. Migration cuts to the very heart of who ‘we’ and ‘they’ are and to notions of identity, home and belonging. This book is about the study of international migration, the social theories that are being and might be employed in the understanding of a phenomenon, and the wonderful breadth of empirical work that has been (and continues to be) undertaken in this diverse field. By referring to ‘international migration’, we are recognising the existence of nations and are therefore excluding migrations that precede the nation-building enterprise, just as we are excluding domestic or internal migration, processes that actually may be interlinked with international migration in ways it is not possible to consider here (see King and Skeldon 2010). Given that, according to social theorists of nation (see Chapter three), nations are social phenomena that were somewhat ‘invented’ or created in the 19th century, this book is concerned with a relatively new phenomenon: the movement of individuals and groups from one country, state or nation to another, to reside elsewhere at least on a temporary basis, often more permanently, the purpose being more than a visit or tourism. In particular this book examines the ways in which the phenomenon of international migration has been studied, conceptualised and theorised by scholars, and suggests a theoretical framework that can provide coherence for the existing mass of disparate works already undertaken and that can inform future data collection and analysis. Migration is by no means a new phenomenon. Humans have moved as individuals and groups since they first populated the earth, perhaps because mobility, as John Urry (2007) has eloquently demonstrated, is inherent to the nature of all social entities, whether the movement itself is actual or potential. However, there is little doubt that international migration has been increasing, especially in the past 30 years; most academic books on the subject begin with some such statement. Bommes and Morawska (2005: 1) suggest that the recent ‘enormous expansion of international population flows’ began in the 1980s, and increased by about 2 to 4 million a year throughout the 1990s. Koser (2007:1) says ‘[t]here are more international migrants today than ever before, and their number is certain to increase for the foreseeable future’. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM 2008) the number has recently reached 2 million, though it is worth remembering this still only equates to about 3 per cent of the world’s total population (in King and Skeldon 2010). Faist (2003: 3) made the observation that ‘if merged into a single country, this ‘nation of migrants’ would be the world’s tenth largest nation-state’. Brettell and Hollifield (2008: 1) suggest that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the immigrant population of the US stood ‘at a historic high of 36 million’ and that ‘Europe has experienced a similar influx of foreigners’. Migration now affects every corner of the globe not just the previously recognised countries of net immigration; as Bommes and Morawska (2005) note, migration has become a normal feature of contemporary societies. 4 Migration has become a vast topic for scholars, and literature on it is abundant and growing every day. As international migration has grown in numbers, and in extent, has spread to every corner of the globe, and has become increasingly diverse and fluid, so academic interest in the phenomenon of migration has almost reached fever-pitch, with ‘analyses from every conceivable point pouring out’ (Skeldon: 1997: ix). Migration is a central dynamic in the process of globalisation (Skeldon: 1997), that is inextricably linked with other important global issues, including development, poverty, and human rights (Koser 2007: 1). We witness increased concern on the part of governments and international organisations to control (permit or stifle) flows, which are seen variously as dangerous influxes that lead to clashes of culture, as the source of valuable remittances, or as challenging the sovereignty of states through increased levels of irregularity and transnationalism (Castles and Miller 2009: 3; Joly 2004). Migration researchers discuss the challenges it poses, and its history, draw attention to its increased feminization, and propose various typologies. Reading about international migration, one might typically hear the following being distinguished, inter alia: labour migrants, and skilled or professional migrants, students, retirement migrants, nomads, refugees, or asylum seekers, forced migration, or return migration. There are countries of emigration and countries of immigration (a distinction being undermined by contemporary fluid, return, virtual and indeterminate flows); there are South to North and East to West migrations (one hears of flows in the opposite direction to these much less often). An there are migration systems, principally North America, Western Europe, the Gulf, Asia and the Pacific, and the Southern Cone of South America (Massey et al 1998). Research on migration has drawn the attention of a host of disciplines, including sociology and anthropology, human geography and demography, politics, history and international relations, and even cultural studies and the arts. International migration is analysed in terms of any or all of the following and more besides: geographical areas, historical trends, and issues of security, and minorities and politics (Castles and Miller 2009); globalisation, development, irregular migration, refugees, and migrants in society (Koser 2007); citizenship, social
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