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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In a world of increasingly heated political debates on migration, relentlessly caught up in questions of security, humanitarian crisis, and cultural “problems,” this book radically shifts the focus to address migration through the lens of inequality.
Taking an innovative approach, Mirna Safi offers a fresh perspective on how migration is embedded in the elementary mechanisms that shape the landscape of inequality. She sketches out three distinct channels which lead to unequal outcomes for different migrating and non-migrating groups: the global division of labor; the production of legal and administrative categories; and the reconfiguration of symbolic ethnoracial groups. Respectively, these channels categorize migrants as “type of workers,” “type of citizens,” and “type of humans.” Examining this intersection across the U.S. and Europe, she shows how studying international migration together with inequality can challenge nationally established paradigms of social justice.
This timely book will be essential reading for all students and researchers interested in the sociology and politics of migration, ethnic and racial studies, and social inequality and stratification.
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Brief Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Detailed Contents
Figures & Tables
Figures
Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Rethinking Migration beyond Securitarianism, Humanitarianism, and Culturalism
1 From National to Migration Societies
Basic Definitions and Measurements Issues
From geographic mobility to international migration
Who counts as a migrant? An ascriptive, durable, and transmissible status
Patterns and Trends in International Migration: A Brief History
Is international migration on the rise? The value of long-term perspectives
Are we experiencing a “migrant crisis”?
Migration Studies in the Social Sciences: An Overview
Why do people move? Theories of migration
What do migrants become? Theories of assimilation and integration
What are the consequences of migration?
Notes
2 Migration and Elementary Mechanisms of Social Inequality: A Conceptual Framework
What Is Inequality?
Inequality of what?
Inequality between whom?
How does inequality work?
Toward an Elementary Framework for the Study of Inequality
Migration: A Case Study for Inequality Research
Notes
3 The Economic Channel: Migrant Workers in the Global Division of Labor
Migrants in the Global Division of Labor
Migration and labor market adjustments
Migration and worldwide economic inequality
Migration Effects on Labor Market Inequality
Migration effects on native outcomes
Migration, women, and minorities in the labor market
Migration and the Economic Channel of Inequality: The Complexity of the Underlying Factors
Notes
4 The Legal Channel: Immigration Law, Administrative Management of Migrants, and Civic Stratification
Migration, Citizenship, and Legal Categorization
From border control to entry types and legal status
Citizenship and immigration laws
Migration, Legal Categorization, and Inequality
Unequal access to resources
Legal de-/recategorization of immigrants and the remaking of inequality
Notes
5 The Ethnoracial Channel: Migration, Group Boundary-Making, and Ethnoracial Classifications
The Ethnoracial Dimension of Inequality
From ethnicity and race to ethnoracial formation
In search of an impossible taxonomy
The elementary processes of ethnoracial formation
From Ethnoracial Boundaries to Ethnoracial Inequality
Migration, Ethnoracial Recategorization, and the Reconfiguration of Inequality
Migration and within-nation ethnoracial reconfigurations
Fitting in the ethnoracial order
Reshaping the ethnoracial order
Migration and global ethnoracial reconfigurations
Redefining the nation in nation-state
Migration and ethnoracial formation processes beyond national categories
Notes
Conclusion: Migration, an Issue of Social Justice
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 From National to Migration Societies
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Migration and Inequality
Mirna Safi
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Mirna Safi 2020
The right of Mirna Safi to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2210-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2211-8(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Safi, Mirna, author.
Title: Migration and inequality / Mirna Safi.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “In a world of increasingly heated political debates on migration, this book radically shifts the focus to address migration through the lens of inequality. Mirna Safi shows migration to be a mechanism of inequality and shows how studying international migration can challenge current limited, nationally established paradigms of social justice”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019027638 (print) | LCCN 2019027639 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509522101 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781509522118 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509522149 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Emigration and immigration--Social aspects. | Immigrants--Social conditions. | Social justice.
Classification: LCC JV6225 .S235 2020 (print) | LCC JV6225 (ebook) | DDC 304.8--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027638
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027639
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Detailed Contents
Figures & Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Rethinking Migration beyond Securitarianism, Humanitarianism, and Culturalism
1 From National to Migration Societies
Basic Definitions and Measurements Issues
From geographic mobility to international migration
Who counts as a migrant? An ascriptive, durable, and transmissible status
Patterns and Trends in International Migration: A Brief History
Is international migration on the rise? The value of long-term perspectives
Are we experiencing a “migrant crisis”?
Migration Studies in the Social Sciences: An Overview
Why do people move? Theories of migration
What do migrants become? Theories of assimilation and integration
What are the consequences of migration?
2 Migration and Elementary Mechanisms of Social Inequality: A Conceptual Framework
What Is Inequality?
Inequality of what?
Inequality between whom?
How does inequality work?
Toward an Elementary Framework for the Study of Inequality
Migration: A Case Study for Inequality Research
3 The Economic Channel: Migrant Workers in the Global Division of Labor
Migrants in the Global Division of Labor
Migration and labor market adjustments
Migration and worldwide economic inequality
Migration Effects on Labor Market Inequality
Migration effects on native outcomes
Migration, women, and minorities in the labor market
Migration and the Economic Channel of Inequality: The Complexity of the Underlying Factors
4 The Legal Channel: Immigration Law, Administrative Management of Migrants, and Civic Stratification
Migration, Citizenship, and Legal Categorization
From border control to entry types and legal status
Citizenship and immigration laws
Migration, Legal Categorization, and Inequality
Unequal access to resources
Legal de-/recategorization of immigrants and the remaking of inequality
5 The Ethnoracial Channel: Migration, Group Boundary-Making, and Ethnoracial Classifications
The Ethnoracial Dimension of Inequality
From ethnicity and race to ethnoracial formation
In search of an impossible taxonomy
The elementary processes of ethnoracial formation
From Ethnoracial Boundaries to Ethnoracial Inequality
Migration, Ethnoracial Recategorization, and the Reconfiguration of Inequality
Migration and within-nation ethnoracial reconfigurations
Migration and global ethnoracial reconfigurations
Conclusion: Migration, an Issue of Social Justice
References
Index
Figures & Tables
Figures
1.1 The foreign-born as a percentage of the total population in OECD countries, 2017
1.2 Major refugee hosting countries in 2015 and 2016
1.3 The share of humanitarian migration in overall permanent migration flows to OECD countries, 2008–17
2.1 Elementary mechanisms of social stratification
3.1 Migration and inequality: the economic channel
4.1 Legal and administrative categorization of migration in OECD countries
4.2 Migration and inequality: the legal channel
5.1 Migration and inequality: the ethnoracial channel
Tables
1.1Perceived and real proportion of the foreign-born population in some OECD countries
2.1 The three channels through which migration affects inequality dynamics
5.1 Migration and ethnoracial boundary dynamics at the national and global levels
Acknowledgments
This book builds heavily on former research conducted by social science scholars, the overwhelming majority of whom I do not know personally. It also owes much to colleagues I’ve had the tremendous opportunity to meet, work and discuss with. As enriching exchanges with Roger Waldinger encouraged me to put my thinking all together in a book, I feel particularly indebted to him now that the book is ready. I also want to extend my sincere appreciation to Patrick Simon, who supported and improved the first intellectual steps for this book. Collaborations and exchanges with him have been deeply gratifying to me on both personal and professional grounds. Additionally, the consolidation of earlier material owes a lot to formal and informal discussions I’ve had from outstanding colleagues like Yann Algan, Françoise Lorcerie, Andrea Réa, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, and Andreas Wimmer.
I am also indebted to my colleagues and friends at my center, OSC-Sciences Po. Discussions with them have certainly strengthened the book. While I feel grateful to all of them, I want to express my special thanks to Carlo Barone, Philippe Coulangeon, Emanuele Ferragina, Olivier Godechot, Haley McAvey, Ettore Recchi, and Matthew Soener for their comments, suggestions, and encouragements. Bernard Corminboeuf helped me improve the diagrams used for this project and I am profoundly grateful to him. Finally, I’ve been lucky to benefit from Sciences Po and the LIEPP’s financial support.
I feel endlessly grateful to my family, Pierre, Tamim, Mayad, and Liya, for their unconditional love and support.
Most of this book’s thinking began to take shape during a harsh personal period that will make it always be associated with the loss of my father; I would like to dedicate it to him with infinite love and respect.
Introduction: Rethinking Migration beyond Securitarianism, Humanitarianism, and Culturalism
Despite variability in demographic, political and socioeconomic contexts, immigration has been increasingly depicted as a “social problem” in public debate across Western democracies. Cross-national population movements are most commonly presented as exogenously and illegitimately affecting the economic, political, social, and cultural stability of nation-states. In most societies, immigration is thus incessantly linked to the rise of unemployment, crime, segregation, poverty, and terrorism, and is more generally presented as undermining social cohesion.
These representations generally draw on three distinct “repertoires” that fuel similar narratives about immigration in public discourse despite some variation in their combination across countries: “securitarianism,” humanitarianism and culturalism. Securitarianism denotes the increasing tendency to relate migration to the issue of security of physical borders in the nation-state. This entails the now well-established restrictive turn in immigration policy, with harsher entry rules and increasingly militarized border controls becoming a worldwide model of migration governance. Humanitarianism refers to the inclination to present migrant reception as a “humanitarian act” in wealthy and stable societies that cannot close their eyes to the political, economic, or social injustice usually depicted in the global South. Receiving migrants who seek a better life is therefore a question of generosity, and the political debate is concerned by the degree to which such an aim should and could be fulfilled, as clearly shown by the recent “refugee crisis.” Finally, culturalism pertains to the tendency to perceive immigration as injecting cultural differences in receiving societies (religion, language, norms and values, ways of being, etc.). Whether politically framed as involving cultural “diversity” or cultural “fragmentation,” culturalism draws on the substantive association of immigration with increasing heterogeneity in nation-states originally perceived as ethnically or culturally homogeneous. Although they may bear upon distinctive political and philosophical backgrounds, these three repertoires (securitarianism, humanitarianism, and culturalism) share the common assumption that the nation-state’s perimeter naturally and legitimately limits equal access to political, economic, cultural, and symbolic resources between migrants and non-migrants. Notwithstanding the preconceptions they convey, the public debates surrounding migration are indicative of the degree to which the subject touches central social issues with implications of social justice and the distribution of economic, political, cultural, and symbolic resources.
These repertoires have impacted social science research on migration and fueled its impressive proliferation over the last several decades. Stepping back from immediate policy debates, this book offers a synthesis of this vast literature with a social stratification lens highlighting the specific channels through which migration contributes to the (re)making of inequality. Social inequality is defined in a broad sense: it refers to the fact that some individuals, families, groups, countries (or any other relevant social category) enjoy a disproportionate share of some desired good (income, wealth, rights, respect, etc.). Textbooks on inequality overwhelmingly focus on the triptych class/race/gender. Migration is sporadically tackled through its relation to class and/or race and is rarely treated as a specific component of inequality. This book presents a unified framework relating migration to social inequality. It therefore aims at bridging the gap between three relatively distinct social science fields: migration and immigration studies, ethnic and racial studies, and social stratification and inequality studies. Positioning migration research at the crossroads of these scientific streams fosters our understanding of both migratory dynamics and social inequality mechanisms.
The first chapter maps the terrain of the book. It summarizes contemporary patterns and trends in migration and discusses definition and measurement issues. It also identifies the main areas of inquiry in the field, covering a variety of disciplinary perspectives and theoretical approaches. Chapter 2 moves to the field of stratification and discusses its contemporary developments. Drawing on an analytical framework that summarizes social stratification elementary mechanisms, this chapter attempts to synthetically conceptualize the relation between migration and inequality by identifying three main channels. The next three chapters elaborate on each of these channels. Chapter 3 reviews the literature that has traditionally associated migration with the global division of labor, thus entailing the joint mechanisms of workers’ categorization and redistribution of economic resources. Chapter 4 builds on insights from legal and political scholarship that insist on the way in which migration creates and reshapes inequality through the joint mechanisms of citizenship categorization and redistribution of legal resources. Chapter 5 deals with the symbolic channel through which migration impacts inequality by reconfiguring group boundary dynamics and reshaping ethnoracial classifications. Each chapter starts with an assessment of theories informing the effect of migration on inequality, before moving to the main empirical findings in the corresponding literature. The conclusion discusses current concerns about migration in the light of its conceptualization as a case-study for inequality research.
1 From National to Migration Societies
This chapter provides an overview of the demographic scope of international migration and examines the main challenges it raises in contemporary societies. First, I present the definition of international migration and introduce related concepts such as immigrant generations and immigrant origins. I then move to summarizing the long-term trends in migration flows with a particular focus on Western societies. The final section summarizes the state of the field, identifying three main directions in which migration research has been developing: the driving factors of population movements, the process of assimilation of immigrants and their descendants in host societies, and the effects of migration in sending and receiving societies.
Basic Definitions and Measurements Issues
From geographic mobility to international migration
Migration is central to human history (Fisher 2014). The concept is very broad, and it concerns each one of us to varying degrees. While some people spend most of their lives migrating (nomadic groups, seasonal workers, diplomats, travelers, etc.), moving to a new place during the life course is likely to occur at least a few times, usually in relation to individual events, such as unions, family separation and re-composition, childbearing and job seeking; or collective ones, such as wars, revolutions, famines, natural disasters, etc. Major historical processes such as conquests and military conflicts, slavery, empire building, colonization and decolonization, urbanization and environmental change have all occurred in relation to intense population movements. So have most technological advancements and innovations, like hunting, sailing, agriculture, industrialization, etc.
A definition of migration that encompasses the wide diversity of migratory patterns emphasizes the “cross-community movement” that it entails (Manning 2013).1 While spatial mobility can be fundamentally understood as core human behavior, the scope and delimitation of human communities have continually changed over history, which in turn has affected the definition of human migration. Languages have been a central marker of community boundaries, and processes of differentiation and convergence of languages have been closely related to human movements across the globe; along with genetics, linguistic evidence is the most commonly used indicator for inferring ancient patterns of migration. The focus of this book is on a particular type of “modern migration,” which can be called “cross-political-community migration” in a context where all the earth’s land has been virtually claimed by fewer than 200 globally recognized national entities.2 It is this particular type of modern geographic mobility, referred to as international migration, that will be most relevant in the following pages. Much like the evolution of language boundaries, nation-building processes have been intertwined with human migration and continue to be affected by it.
In parallel to international migration, internal migration constitutes a considerable share of overall human migration.3 Sometimes referred to as residential mobility, it is a major phenomenon in large countries such as India and China. Despite occurring within nation-states, internal migration sometimes entails the crossing of administrative and political boundaries (states, regions, provinces, etc.). Although I do not elaborate in this book on internal migration, we should bear in mind that its relationship to labor and to its socio-legal status, as well as its effects on group boundary-making, share many aspects with international migration.
Who counts as a migrant? An ascriptive, durable, and transmissible status
When I discuss the definition of international migration with students, it is not unusual to notice that some of them are quite surprised, if not troubled, when they realize that they may fit the description. One of them once told me: “According to your definition, I would be an immigrant. There is something wrong there.” The student in question was born in Egypt and lived there for only a few years, during which time his parents were working there. His family, of relatively high socioeconomic background, moved back to France, where he grew up, went to school, and attended college. The word “immigrant” was obviously negatively charged for him, and his reaction was to challenge any identification of his personal experience with the subject matter of the course.
Migrants are among the most stigmatized population categories in Western democracies. Social representations spread by the media and political debates tend to draw strong associations with the undocumented, the poor, the minorities, etc. Western workers who settle in developing countries are rarely referred to as immigrants – they are most often called “expats.” And this is true even within developed countries: immigrants in France are rarely portrayed as Germans or Swiss, for example, even though these countries are the birthplaces of a considerable share of French residents and are included in immigration national statistics. The use of words such as migrant or immigrant in the public debate conveys a variety of connotations (socioeconomic, ethnoracial, legal, etc.), thus diverging from its scientific definition. But how then do we define international migrants?
One needs to migrate to be a migrant, and migration is a movement in place between two observational moments. The very concept of migration consequently requires delimiting boundaries of space and time. As mentioned above, international migration is usually defined by relying on national categorization of space: international migrants move across national boundaries. The definition also uses birth date as a time reference: international migrants move away from their country of birth.4
When one considers a given country c at a given time t, it thus becomes possible to define the immigrant population as being composed of persons who live in c at time t even though they were born in another country (c’).5 This population is also referred to as “foreign-born.” Relying on this definition, the international migrant population can be estimated worldwide: in 2015, the number of immigrants stood at almost 244 million, according to the UN Population Division; this means that about 3.3 percent of the earth’s inhabitants currently live in a country different from their country of birth. A major share of current migration moves to the “developed countries”; 23 percent of migrants actually migrate within the Northern part of the globe, and 35 percent take the South–North migration path. South–South migration remains nonetheless considerable (around 35 percent of worldwide international migration). Top sending countries are India (15.6 million), Mexico (12.3 million), Russia (10.6 million) and China (9.5 million), while top receiving countries are the United States (46.6 million), Germany (12 million), Russia (11.6 million) and Saudi Arabia (10.2 million). In relative terms, the proportion of the foreign-born exceeds 80 percent in several Persian Gulf countries, such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. This share is around 13 percent in OECD countries, exceeding 25 percent in countries such as Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Australia, while countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France are closer to the OECD average (see Figure 1.1 for more details).
Figure 1.1 The foreign-born as a percentage of the total population in OECD countries, 2017
Source: OECD International Migration Database
Since it is closely linked to the delimitation of national boundaries, the definition of migration is subject to political disputation. An instructive example can be found in the definition of “immigrant” in postcolonial contexts. In France, for instance, the “foreign-born” definition has been considered unsatisfactory, since it includes French return colonials (“repatriates”) and French emigrants’ children born abroad.6 France’s public statistics institutions thus prefer a more complex definition, adding a nationality-at-birth criterion: an immigrant is a person who was born abroad and is non-French at birth. This two-criteria definition is intrinsically political, since both categories are, strictly speaking, migrants: they moved away from their place of birth and across national borders (Beauchemin and Safi 2019). Yet their migration is not considered to have crossed the “political community” borders, either because the geographic borders themselves moved in the meantime (in the case of return colonials), or because transmitting political membership (nationality) is made possible beyond the geographic limits of the state (in the case of emigrants’ children). The decision to exclude them from the immigrant population is also justified by the fact that the social trajectories of these populations, who were recognized as French citizens at birth, sharply differ from those of other foreign-born populations (on political, socioeconomic, linguistic, cultural, and symbolic grounds).
This example clearly shows that while the definition of international migration derives from a country-level classification, it also relates to the concept of “society,” thus involving a combination of geographic, political, social, cultural, and symbolic dimensions. Other examples can be found in complex migration settings such as return colonial migration from South Africa to the United Kingdom, national overseas migrants in France, internal rural migrants in China, Puerto Rican migrants in the United States, etc. International statistics on migration tend to overlook these specific cases, using the foreign-born definition as an operational one in comparative perspective.
From the point of view of the receiving country, one important implication of the definition of international migration lies in the fact that, as long as settlement endures, immigrants remain immigrants: one can therefore speak of immigrant status as a stable one in host societies. It may also be regarded as an ascriptive status7 since it is linked to a place of birth criterion, which renders it a characteristic that individuals cannot alter (Shachar 2009).8 Here it is important to distinguish the concept of immigrant from the neighboring concept of foreigner: while foreigners can acquire citizenship and thus become nationals – more or less easily, depending on the host country’s citizenship legislation – it is only when immigrants reto live in their country of birth that they stop being immigrants.9 In other words, immigrants remain immigrants even when they acquire their host country’s citizenship. Moreover, the immigrant status itself tends to be transmissible. Indeed, debates on migration often go beyond the experience of migrants themselves to encompass that of their offspring, usually referred to as second-generation immigrants. Even when born in the host country – which means that they did not experience migration – and even when the host country grants them nationality (by birth or in early age stages), immigrant descendants are still part of the immigration debate both in the academic and the political sphere (Luthra et al. 2018). Moreover, the distinction between first- and second-generation immigrants is not as clear-cut as it may appear: immigrant descendants who were born in the origin country and migrated with their parents when young are, strictly speaking, immigrants themselves (since they live in a country different from their country of birth). One may nonetheless argue that they are quite similar to native-born second-generation immigrants. Moreover, some immigrant descendants have a mixed background if they have one native parent, which may render their social experience quite different. This led some scholars to argue in favor of a finer classification of immigrant generations, such as the decimal system introduced by Rumbaut (2004). Among the first generation, this classification distinguishes between earlier arrived migrants (G1.5) and migrants arrived as adults (G1). Among migrant descendants, researchers usually distinguish between mixed-ascendance second generations (G2.5) and children of two immigrant parents (G2). All in all, migration scholars and statistical agencies have been using information on nativity, parental nativity, and sometimes age at migration to produce a number of different generational classifications of immigrants. As discussed in the following section, these debates on immigrant generations are closely related to the assimilation paradigm. At this stage, it is worth highlighting that, from the perspective of the receiving country, the immigrant definition entails an ascriptive, durable and somehow transmissible status. As discussed in the rest of the book, this has major implications on the dynamics of social inequality in supposedly meritocratic societies that receive a considerable share of international migrants.
In most countries, people tend to overestimate the immigrant population (Alba et al. 2005; Herda 2010; Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014). This is undoubtedly related to the increasing salience of immigration in the political debate, most often portrayed as an uncontrolled invasion. But this overestimation might also be related to the intrinsic fuzziness of the concept, as discussed above; distinctions of immigrant cohorts and generations, heterogeneity in terms of countries of origin and socioeconomic status also contribute to blurring the boundaries between immigrant and non-immigrant populations in social representations (see Table 1.1).
Table 1.1 Perceived and real proportion of the foreign-born population in some OECD countries (%)
Perceived proportion of immigrants, 2014
Real proportion of immigrants, 2014
Austria
26.2
16.59
Belgium
29.1
15.64
Switzerland
31.3
26.82
Czech Republic
9.1
3.77
Germany
22.4
12.14
Denmark
13.6
10.12
Estonia
21.6
14.94
Spain
21.8
12.81
Finland
9.5
5.46
France
26.0
11.72
UK
27.3
12.50
Hungary
11.2
4.53
Ireland
20.1
16.10
Lithuania
11.2
4.67
Netherlands
23.8
11.61
Norway
16.2
13.79
Poland
9.1
1.63
Portugal
24.1
8.24
Sweden
20.6
15.89
Slovenia
23.2
11.42
Source
: Perceived proportion: European Social Survey, round 7, 2014 (
https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/data/download.html?r=7
); real proportion: Eurostat 2014 (
http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=migr_imm8&lang=en
)
Patterns and Trends in International Migration: A Brief History
Is international migration on the rise? The value of long-term perspectives
Quantifying the long-term evolution of human migration is a complex task. Vast transformations of structural conditions have affected the quantity of flows and their routes; while, in the past, travelers used their feet, horses, or boats to move across the globe, the accumulation of existing linkages and connections created by former flows, along with technological advancement in transportation and communication, has opened new routes for human mobility. Moreover, and conversely to the relative stability of natural geography, the boundaries that are relevant to measuring migration – in other words, human geography – have kept changing. The most recent decades witnessed huge transformations in the institutional governance of migration driven by the generalization of restrictive policies, tougher and increasingly sophisticated border control and hardening anti-immigration attitudes. These transformations limit the scope of comparisons in the long run.
Historical perspectives remain useful nonetheless, mainly because they challenge some misconceptions on the exceptional nature of current migration. Far from being a characteristic feature of the present era, migratory flows have been constantly reshaping the world population distribution through small-scale yet steady population movements. Historians thus tend to see migration as a slow and self-sustaining process that keeps changing the face of the world. They also agree on the fact that the period from 1850 to 1930 was the most intensive era of migration in human history (Manning 2013: 154). This age of mass migration witnessed the journey of more than 60 million Europeans moving to the four corners of the earth, settling in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (Hatton and Williamson 1998). Migration at the turn of the twentieth century consequently led to a reallocation of the earth’s inhabitants across the continents, with huge and ongoing effects on languages, cultures, and economic dynamics. The post-World War II period was also marked by massive episodes of migration. Long-distance movements after 1945 involved all regions of the world, with greater mobility from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Regarding the most recent period, finer data allow even more precise analyses. An extensive worldwide database has been built by the World Bank, compiling more than a thousand national censuses and population registers. Using this data, Özden and coauthors (2011) sketch a global origin-destination migration matrix for each decade in the period between 1960 and 2000. Their research shows that, while there is indeed an increase in absolute value, global migration as a percentage of the worldwide population actually tends to decrease (2011: 3). The authors also find evidence of spread in the scope of migration and multiplication of migration corridors, which they interpret as growing connectedness between countries in terms of bilateral migration. Using the same data, Czaika and De Haas (2014) argue that most general assumptions do not hold on the global level: neither the increasing trends, nor diversification, nor extension of geographic scope, nor even feminization. The authors particularly emphasize variability in the conclusions that one may draw, depending on the perspectives of sending or receiving societies. While emigrants tend to come from increasingly diversified countries, they are concentrating more and more in a few destination countries (the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, the Gulf countries). This shift in the global directionality of migration is mainly driven by the transformation of Europe from a global source region of emigrants and settlers into a global migration magnet. The fact that national and ethnic origins of the immigrant population have become increasingly non-European might be lying behind a Eurocentric vision of migration as a growing phenomenon. The data used by Özden et al. and by Czaika and De Haas only goes as far as 2000; more recent data on worldwide migration nonetheless confirms that the increase in international migration remains modest in proportional terms (2.8 percent of the world population in 2000 to 3.3 percent in 2015) (IOM 2017: 15).
Are we experiencing a “migrant crisis”?
With migration currently in the spotlight, it has become common to read and hear that the world is experiencing a “crisis,” especially since 2015. It is alternately referred to as a “migrant crisis” and a “refugee crisis,” with increasingly politicized distinctions between the two expressions.10 Despite being perceptible in the United States, Canada and other central immigration countries, this discourse is the most powerful in Europe, marked by a tangible rise in refugee flows and asylum requests in recent years. Violent conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and other Middle Eastern and African countries have been displacing masses, mostly to poor and middle-income neighboring countries, but also to a lesser extent to Europe, mainly via Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, Malta, and Cyprus. More than a million people crossed into Europe in 2015, and similar figures have been estimated for 2016. Within Europe, the overwhelming majority of refugees have been hosted by Germany and Sweden. In early 2017, the number of refugees in the world exceeded 22 million, while the number of displaced (including within nation-states) was around 65 million.
There is an ongoing debate on the extent to which the current migrant crisis deserves this denomination (Dustmann et al. 2016; Hatton 2016; Holmes and Castañeda 2016). As mentioned above, historical research shows that long-distance geographic mobility is not quantitatively more intense today; current migration flows indeed lag behind the ones experienced during the age of “mass migration” at the turn of the twentieth century and post-1945 migration. And even if the comparison were to be limited to refugee flows, the current events are not so exceptional: around 18 million refugees fled Southeastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall and the dissolution of Yugoslavia; most of them sought asylum in European states. Consequently, quantitatively speaking, qualifying the current period as a migratory crisis does not seem to be appropriate. And in any case, if a crisis does exist, it is not OECD countries but developing, conflict-neighboring countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan that have been carrying out the bulk of it (see Figure 1.2).11Figure 1.3 shows that the “humanitarian” type of migration has remained a small share of overall migration flows to OECD countries during the last decade.
Figure 1.2 Major refugee hosting countries in 2015 and 2016 Source: UNHCR 2017: 15
Figure 1.3 The share of humanitarian migration in overall permanent migration flows to OECD countries, 2008–2017
Source: OECD calculations based on national statistics: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/888933750947
The global context of migration has nonetheless changed, which may explain why it is increasingly perceived as a crisis. First, the hegemonic organization of the world into nation-states undoubtedly created increasing political pressure on migration. While migration flows at the turn of the twentieth century were mostly spontaneous and unregulated, and those of the post-1945 period were mostly commanded by the hosting countries themselves, today’s migration poses increasing challenges to the nation-state and questions its ability to regulate movements of people across its boundaries (Hollifield 2006; Brubaker 2010). This feeds a certain lack of confidence in the capacity of political leaders to manage the phenomenon and reach viable and acceptable solutions (Banulescu-Bogdan and Papademetriou 2016). Thus, the migrant crisis is also one of political governance and trust, at the level both of the European institutions and of individual member states.
But recent migration is not only a question of border control. Migration is increasingly experienced and represented in terms of a “crisis” because it provokes clear hostility within receiving societies, exacerbating xenophobic and racial tensions in the political debate. Images of brutality against migrants crossing the borders of Eastern Europe are extreme illustrations of this deep discomfort. The increasing political salience of immigration is reflected in the rise of xenophobic sentiment and the expanding influence of the far right in many countries. As recently shown in the United Kingdom and the United States, attitudes toward immigration have been particularly influential in orienting the political debate, directly affecting election results. Social sciences still poorly understand the channels through which these attitudes take shape and how they evolve. In many countries, recent studies have been suggesting a hiatus between people’s representations toward migration and its underlying demographic and socioeconomic realities (Dustmann and Preston 2007; Hopkins et al. 2016; Sides 2016). Empirical assessments have increasingly been challenging established theories on the topic, such as minority threat and economic competition (Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014); they suggest that attitudes toward immigration are largely symbolic in nature and that emotions, moral commitments and salience in the public sphere play an important role in shaping the collective ethos related to the topic (Dustmann and Preston 2007; Sides and Citrin 2007; Merolla et al. 2013). Evidence also points to the role of political leadership and media coverage in creating and sustaining a spillover of misconceptions and beliefs that become increasingly disconnected from facts and realities (Berry et al. 2016). The proliferation of information and its increasingly unregulated and uncontrolled nature within formal and informal media are making evidence-based discourse all the less audible. Moreover, the current immigration political debate is highly sensitive toward, and overlaps with, other issues such as international conflicts and terrorism, as well as narratives about crime, ethnoracial and religious diversity, gender politics, and other highly influential public topics.
