Migration, Class and Symbolic Status: Nigerians in the Netherlands and Greece

Apostolos Andrikopoulos

Introduction

In migration scholarship class has been the focus of analysis mainly for issues of migrants’ incorporation into host societies and economies. When migration scholars use class as an analytical concept, this is to explore the inequalities that immigrants experience in the West and the class dimen- sions of their ethno-racial categorisation and exclusion. The emphasis to social networks, ethnicity and cultural aspects of migration has distracted the attention of scholars away from the importance of class and capital for the migration process and the implementation of migration goals. Today a growing number of scholars (Van Hear, 2004; McGregor, 2008; Colic-Peisker, 2008; Amit, 2007) call for attention to the impact of class and money on international human mobility. Nicholas Van Hear (2004), while recognizing the importance role of social networks in the migration process, suggests that the currently stringent migration policies of west- ern states have increased the cost of migration and thus the significance of money for the realisation of migration projects. By analyzing cases of forced migration, he comes to the conclusion that money is today, more than ever before, important in the migration process, and determines the migration routes used, the means of migration employed and the destina- tions chosen. The restrictive policies of European states on low-skilled labour migra- tion from non-western countries, on the one hand, and the promotion of specific types of migration, such as the professional migration, on the other hand, have designated the possession of money and class as determinant factors for the migration process. The first objective of this chapter is to illustrate with ethnographic material the impact of class and money in the migration process and the increasingly closer relation between migrants’ legality in Europe with their socio-economic back- ground in their countries of origin. The second aim is to document, by using insights of Nigerian diasporic communities in Greece and Holland, how inequalities that have been generated by the exclusionary policies toward low-skilled labour migration have affected intra-group hierarchies 166 apostolos andrikopoulos within migrant communities and intensified the dependency relations between documented and undocumented migrants. The arguments developed in this chapter are supported with ethno- graphic material on Nigerian Diaspora that I collected in my fieldwork in Thessaloniki, Greece and Amsterdam. In Thessaloniki, fieldwork was conducted from October 2004 to August 2005, which examined the for- mation of social relationships among the residents of a neighbourhood in which many Nigerians live and in which several Nigerian owned shops are located (Andrikopoulos, 2005). Additionally, from July to November 2006 I participated in a research project about immigrant entrepreneur- ship in Thessaloniki (see Labrianidis and Hatziprokopiou, 2010), inter- viewing almost all the Nigerian shopkeepers of the city, among others. In Amsterdam, fieldwork about Nigerian migrants of the city was con- ducted from March to August 2008 (Andrikopoulos, 2009).

Nigerian Diaspora and Migration Patterns

In the last few decades Nigerian diasporic networks expanded to almost all countries of the western world in significant numbers. The most popu- lar destinations in the Global North for Nigerian migrants have been Eng- lish speaking countries such as the USA (160,000 Nigerians in 2004), the UK (88,380 in 2001), Canada (10,425 in 2001) and Ireland (9,225 in 2002) (de Haas 2006: 9). Other western countries that host today a considerable number of Nigerians are Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Greece, Australia, Belgium, Spain and France. The patterns of international mobil- ity originating from Nigeria vary, and these may include, among others: professional migration, student migration, low-skilled labour migration, asylum, human trafficking and family migration. All the above migration patterns are, however, simply categories used by bureaucrats and schol- ars, and can hardly capture the complexities of migrants’ trajectories. For many migrants different patterns can be combined at the same time, or precede one another. In many western states, well-educated and highly-qualified Nigeri- ans have responded to the call for highly-skilled “chosen” migration. In order to further their careers and achieve professional opportunities, many promising young professionals leave Nigeria to work in European or North-American states. Often their academic background is very high and their economic situation better than the average person in Nigeria (Healy and Oikelome 2007; Reynolds 2002; 2009; Komolafe 2008). The main destinations of Nigerian “professional migration” are the US and the UK.