Immigration and Categorical Inequality

Migration to the City and the Birth of Race and Ethnicity

Ernesto Castañeda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351585903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Immigration and Categorical Inequality explains the general processes of migration, the categorization of newcomers in urban areas as racial or ethnic others, and the mechanisms that perpetuate inequality among groups. Inspired by the pioneering work of Charles Tilly on chain migration, transnational communities, trust networks, and categorical inequality, renowned migration scholars apply Tilly's theoretical concepts using empirical data gathered in different historical periods and geographical areas ranging from New York to Tokyo and from Barcelona to Nepal. The contributors of this volume demonstrate the ways in which social boundary mechanisms produce relational processes of durable categorical inequality. This understanding is an important step to stop treating differences between certain groups as natural and unchangeable. This volume will be valuable for scholars, students, and the public in general interested in understanding the periodic rise of nativism in the United States and elsewhere.

1
Understanding Inequality, Migration, Race, and Ethnicity from a Relational Perspective

Ernesto Castañeda

This book analyzes the impact that migration,¹ particularly cumulative long-distance migration into urban areas, has in the creation of categories of people often referred to as immigrant nationalities, ethnicities, or races. Based on social science studies, this book sees “race” not as a natural category but as something socially constructed, with a history to be explored and mechanisms that make it salient as something to be explained (Golash-Boza 2016; Morning 2011).

More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanation for what he understood to be social and cultural differences between different populations of people. He spoke out against the idea of “white” and “black” as discrete groups, claiming that these distinctions ignored the scope of human diversity.

(Gannon 2016)

Race is not a biological fact but rather the result of social categorizations (Bonilla-Silva 2006; Yudell et al. 2016). Categorization aids human cognition by providing decision-making shortcuts (see Massey in this volume). Nominal categories group people in mutually comprehensive ways. Persistent categories, such as those framed around race, ethnicity, or nationality, tend to naturalize historical access to resources and social status over time. Categorical groups become part of a hierarchy with those with more power and resources at the top. Symbolic differences and unequal distribution of resources among social groups create and reproduce categorical inequalities.

Most academic and folk theories about what causes inequality focus on individual barriers and opportunities. In contrast, this book shows how persistent and unquestioned inequality are created and justified by social boundaries between certain groups (Tilly 1998). In the next pages, I introduce Charles Tilly’s work on migration and inequality. I then discuss the work of other relevant authors and different approaches to the issue, including social boundary theory, categorical inequality, social psychological approaches, and theories of race and ethnicity. Finally, I discuss the chapters in this volume and the overall contribution to a growing approach to study the creation and reproduction of inequality.

Tilly’s Contribution to Our Understanding of Migration, Ethnicity and Categorical Inequality

The sociologist Charles “Chuck” Tilly is renowned for his work on revolutions, war, state formation, social movements, and contentious politics (see Castañeda and Schneider 2017). Tilly preferred relational accounts, theoretical and empirical work focused on concrete ties, relations, trading, communication, and interactions between specific individuals and social sites forming networks with emergent properties (Diani 2007; Mische 2011). Tilly was a pioneer in the theorizing of social boundaries and categorical inequality through relational processes among networks of historically marginalized groups, such as migrants or the descendants of slaves. Tilly’s theorizing helps us understand why it is misguided to treat immigration as extraordinary, as a social problem, or as an exception to a world neatly organized in nation-states (Tilly 1984).

Charles Tilly published insightful empirical and theoretical pieces on migration: he was one of the first social scientists to document the important role that social networks play in migration. He described how chain migration results in the concentration of immigrants in certain localities (Tilly and Brown 1967; Tilly 1990). Tilly pointed out how remittances—the money sent by workers abroad to their family in the hometown—are a way to fulfill family obligations, demonstrating the importance of social relations despite distance (Castañeda 2013; Zelizer and Tilly 2006).

Tilly was a student of migration and published on the topic throughout his career. His work relies on migration data and methodologies from historical sociology, demographic, life stories, and ethnographic research. Tilly was part of a collaborative project comparing French immigrants from Lyon who monopolized the silk industry in Paterson, New Jersey, in the nineteenth century and immigrants from Frosinone, Italy, living in Mamaroneck, New York, in the twentieth century (Tilly 2008:127). Reminiscent of Thomas and Znaniecki (1918), the project included looking at letters and photos sent by migrants across the Atlantic as well as many oral history interviews (Castañeda 2009; Castañeda 2017). Unfortunately, Tilly and his coauthors never published the results of that study. Nonetheless, Tilly learned much about migration from these interviews and primary sources.

While Tilly pioneered the quantification of historical events, he also theorized using historical secondary sources as well as qualitative data and ethno-graphic observations. While Tilly was not an ethnographer, he had a great sense of what good ethnography entailed thanks to his many ethnographer colleagues and his having been a mentor to dozens of students conducting ethnographic studies. He was also familiar with the complexities involved in writing ethno-graphic findings. He became very interested in ethnography as a privileged method to understand social processes (Auyero 2006; Smith 2006; Tilly 2006).

Migration Networks

In the same way that Tilly foreshadowed the importance of social networks in facilitating immigration, he also wrote about themes later documented and detailed by other migration scholars. Tilly had a good grasp of the big picture regarding migration processes and ethnic identification.

Tilly explains why migration is not the movement of individuals—as it is commonly understood—but the movement of families, townships, and trust networks. His work corrects the popular but limited understanding of international migration simply as an issue of labor supply and demand based on neoclassical economics (Todaro 1969). For example, after discussing the proletarianization of former European peasants who moved into industrializing centers within Europe, he then discussed the attractiveness of relatively high wages in North America, which encouraged them to leave their place of birth to cross the Atlantic.

Not that the smoothly rational operation of an open, competitive, international labor market characterized by wage differentials accounts for the rhythm and timbre of American immigration. At the very least we need to recognize two facts about that immigration. First, it was and is extraordinarily selective by origin and type of migrant. Second, it usually did not draw on isolated individual decision makers but on clusters of people bound together by acquaintance and common fate. Nor were [the] clusters mere categories —skilled or unskilled, Jew or Gentile, Greek or Italian. To be sure, individuals did migrate to the United States, and sometimes alone. But they did so as participants in social processes that extended far beyond them. Of course, members of different categories of the European population migrated to the United States (and, for that matter, returned to Europe) at spectacularly different rates. But the categories we ordinarily apply to those differences poorly describe the actual groups that lived and organized transatlantic migration.

(Tilly 1990:83; all emphases added by me)

In the quote, Tilly proposes why a relational theory of migration is superior to a neoclassical one (Castañeda 2013). He also talks about how the categories that are used by others to describe migrants in American cities are often not the ones that migrants used before they left their homelands. For example in the United States, Sicilians became “Italians,” Mayas become “Latino,” Galician Polish peasants became “Slavs” in Cleveland, and Albanians passed as Italians in the Bronx’s Little Italy (Cornelius, FitzGerald and Lewin Fischer 2007; Hammack, Grabowski and Grabowski 2002; Kosta 2014; Thomas and Znaniecki 1918).

Tilly also underlined early on the specific ties between sending and receiving networks. Though he did not explicitly use the term “transnational,” he had a transnational network conception of migration (Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton-Blanc 1994):

We need a rough distinction between sending and receiving networks. The connections among people at a given point of origin constitute the sending networks; those among people at the destination, the receiving networks. The knitting together of the two creates new networks that span origin and destination . The distinction can only be rough because many people make multiple moves, and because once a migration system starts operating, the line between “origin” and “destination” begins to blur. Nevertheless, the distinction makes sense because the characteristics of the new networks depend on the pairings that occur at the junction of origin and destination.

(Tilly 1990:86)

I observed these transnational dynamics while conducting ethnographic work in migrant circuits connecting Mexico to New York, Algeria to Paris, and Morocco to Barcelona (Castañeda 2013), and much has been written about the features of migrant transnationalism in recent decades (Glick Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton 1992; Waldinger 2015).

Tilly saw several problems with theories that assumed assimilation to one mainstream culture. He reminded us that assimilation is not fully the result of individual migrants. It is influenced by existing hierarchies in the places of destination (Portes and Zhou 2003):

The network structure of migration makes implausible several standard ways of analyzing immigration: an assimilation of individuals to a dominant culture, as individual status-striving, or as the wholesale transplantation of preexisting groups. “Assimilation” becomes implausible because the paths of change vary enormously from stream to stream of migration, because the process is collective rather than individual, and because the network structure multiplied, contradicts the idea of a dominant pattern to which people might approximate themselves . Individual status-striving, although it surely occurs, accounts poorly for group changes after immigration because it misses the centrality of interpersonal connections to the fate of any particular group. Wholesale transplantation badly describes a process in which people greatly transform their social relations, and often create new group identities. Instead of a series of individual transformations in the direction of a dominant American culture, migration involves negotiation of new relationships both within and across networks. Instead of individual status-striving, collective efforts to cope. Instead of wholesale transplantation, selective re-creation of social ties. Once we recognize the network structure of migration, some of the old, standard questions stop making sense. It is idle, for example, to ask whether in general migrants are smarter, braver, or more desperate than nonmigrants; some systems of social ties select in one direction, some in another. It is not very useful to classify migrants by intentions to stay or to return home, because intentions and possibilities are always more complex than that—and the migrants themselves often cannot see the possibilities that are shaped by their networks …. The decisive, recurrent regularities concern the structures of migration networks themselves.

(Tilly 1990:87–88)

While much of the migration literature is influenced by classic and neoclassical economic assumptions and emphasizes individual rational choice theory, Tilly instead offers a relational perspective. Tilly arrived at these conclusions through demographic and community studies in Delaware (Tilly 1965), which he conducted through the relational understanding of network theory as proposed by Harrison White, as well as through oral histories and historical cases.

Another popular misunderstanding is that every migrant in the world was to go to the United States or to the global north, but Tilly looks at the historical record to qualify this notion:

With respect to wealth, education previous work experience, and region of origin, the 2.3 million Italians who migrated to Argentina between 1860 and 1914 resembled the 4.1 million who migrated to the United States. What is more, the great majority of both groups seem to have arrived via chain migration, with the idea of earning enough to return home . Immediately on arrival in the new land, both groups moved chiefly into unskilled labor. But Italians came to occupy much more prominent positions in Argentina (and especially Buenos Aires) than in the United States (and especially New York). Two factors made a large difference: first, investment opportunities for workers who saved money were greater in Argentina than in the United States; second, it was easier to move from unskilled to skilled jobs in Argentina. Both factors gave Italian immigrants who worked hard and saved in Argentina stronger reasons for remaining in their adopted country.

(Tilly 1968:87)

As we see throughout Tilly’s work, he is interested not only in the particularities of each case but also in looking at patterns and similar mechanisms across cases in different locations and historical periods. The importance of networks to propel and sustain migration (Massey et al. 1987; Massey 1990; Massey et al. 1993; Menjívar 2000) and of transnational connections between receiving and sending communities is much more widely accepted and appreciated today (Castañeda, Morales and Ochoa 2014; Levitt 2001; Mouw et al. 2014; Snel, Hart and Van Bochove 2016). However, important insights about the historical relevance of cities as destinations of migrants and as “factories of ethnicity” remain understudied. It is thus useful to reintroduce Tilly’s argument about cities and the manufacturing of ethnicity.

Cities and Migration

Historically, cities were born because of rural-urban migration (Castañeda 2012a; Castañeda 2012b; Castles and Davidson 2000; Weber 1958). Public areas in cities are places where strangers meet to trade without sharing kinship, religion, or language (Simmel 1971). Since the industrial era, cities have needed a constant infus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• 1 Understanding Inequality, Migration, Race, and Ethnicity from a Relational Perspective
• 2 Migration and Categorical Inequality
• 3 Immigration or Citizenship? Two Sides of One Social History
• 4 Stigmatizing Immigrant Day Labor: Boundary-Making and the Built Environment in Long Island, New York
• 5 Migration-Trust Networks: Unveiling the Social Networks of International Migration
• 6 Ethnic Weddings: Reinventing the Nation in Exile
• 7 Trust Networks and Durable Inequality among Korean Immigrants in Japan
• 8 Ethnic Centralities in Barcelona: Foreign-Owned Businesses between “Commercial Ghettos” and Urban Revitalization
• 9 Remittance-Driven Migration in Spite of Microfinance? The Case of Nepalese Households
• About the Contributors
• Index