The global âimmigration debateâ that has become so central to political life largely involves rehearsing false dichotomies:
Are you âforâ or âagainstâ immigration?Do immigrants represent a threat to national identity or a welcome addition to the cultural mix?Are citizensâ jobs, housing, and welfare at risk because of ânew peopleâ or do migrantsâ labour and spending boost the economy?Should governments do more to restrict the entry of refugees, or do they have a duty to offer sanctuary?
Those who are âforâ immigration praise the cultural contributions of migrants, arguing that they enrich what would, in their view, otherwise be a bland, mono-cultural society. Those âagainstâ mourn the gradual loss of supposedly home-grown traditions and values; they long for a past perceived as less complex and threatening to identities. Advocates of immigration point to the economic success of many migrants, underscoring the social benefits of the skills and labour they bring. Critics express concern over limited funds and pressure on public services. And then thereâs the question of people seeking asylum. Some commentators favour a humanitarian response, arguing that resettled refugees become hard-working citizens and that societies should be judged by the way they treat their most vulnerable members. The alternative view is that hardline border policies are needed in the face of widespread abuse of laws aimed at protecting those facing persecution.
These questions frame a public discourse on immigration that is all too often about âusâ and âthemâ, sedentary citizens and rootless foreigners, or about the potential breaching of the âsovereign bordersâ of nations whose own pasts of movement, emigration and conquest are conveniently forgotten. They also elide the real complexities behind these questions. Arguments around the pressures migration places on public services take little account of the roles immigrants have played in staffing public sector bodies. Asylum systems can both offer protection to survivors of persecution and be used by economic migrants to gain entry into a country. For that matter, there are no clear dividing lines between different types of migration. 1 Scholarly historyâs ability to embrace contradiction and inconvenient truths has the potential to make a significant contribution in this area.
However, debaters on both sides of the âimmigration questionâ donât just currently ignore migrationâs past in all its complexity. They, in fact, invent pasts to suit their current political or ideological purposes. On the one hand, immigrant founders or innovators are lauded as national heroes, when in reality, their trajectories tell us little about the realities of the lives of most migrants. On the other hand, we hear sometimes apocalyptical warnings against current migrant intakes by those who talk of historical periods with lower, more âsustainableâ numbersâwhen, as Donna Gabaccia notes in this volume, the global proportion of people living outside the countries where they were born has remained stable at just over 3% since the 1960s and may be slightly lower than it was a century ago. The stories told about the past fulfil a contemporary functionâto bolster entrenched ideological positions and heighten their emotional resonance. Mobilising the past in these ways may make good political sense, but it does not promote good historical understanding nor does it contribute to informed public debate and policy-making.
This book is a response to the binary thinking and misuse of the past that characterise contemporary immigration debates. It argues that history, and historians, are uniquely placed to contribute to the discussion, and demonstrates the potential of doing so with chapters from scholars in the UK, Asia, Continental Europe, Australasia and North America. Through their work on global, transnational and national histories of migration, an alternative view emergesâone that complicates the entrenched lines of immigration debates and reasserts movement as a central dimension of the human condition. Millennia of human journeys are âforgottenâ in political debatesâincluding those of immigrants, emigrants, sojourners, settlers, workers, colonisers, convicts, enslaved peoples and other forced migrants. Recovering the historical complexity and diversity of migration histories can provide a vital perspective on migration for our times. This book also makes a case for historians to more confidently assert themselves as expert commentators. It features chapters that reflect on how we write migration history today, and how we might do so in the future.
Our ultimate goalâto link scholarly understanding of migration history to current debatesâis ambitious and optimistic, and unapologetically so. It has been inspired by a tradition of historical scholarship that takes the view that connecting academic research to contemporary debates forms an essential part of a scholarâs remit. The US historian Theodore Roszak, writing in the 1960s, condemned academiaâs disengagement from wider social concerns as an âact of criminal delinquencyâ. 2 In the same collection of Essays criticizing the teaching of the humanities in American universities, Staughton Lynd explained how his sense that history had to engage with the present world was the product of his experience of teaching black female students at the time of the US civil rights movement. 3 Historians have much to contribute to the debate on immigration at a time when immigration policy and identity politics are having such a profound effect on so many lives. In this context, it seems vital that we attempt to make our voices heard. In the words of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu:
In Europe, at least, we are, as Edmund Husserl used to say, âhumanityâs civil servantsâ, paid by the government to make discoveries, either about the natural world or about the social world. It seems to me that part of our responsibility is to share what we have found. 4
This quote is taken from Sociology is a Martial Artâa collection of Bourdieuâs writings whose title was borrowed from a film about him called La sociologie est un sport de combat. The original French perhaps gives a better idea of the type of thinking that underpins our book. A âsport de combatâ is a combat sport; it can indeed literally be a martial art, but the expression also hints at other battles to be fought, of a social and political nature, to which an academic discipline such as sociology can contribute. As Bourdieu put it in Pierre Carlesâ documentary, it can be a form of self-defence. 5 But this is to do with self-defence in a social and political context. It is in this sense that we use history hereânot as a didactic tool deployed to enlighten the masses but as a political instrument that can inform, illuminate and encourage different types of thinking beyond the limited realm of academic research. It is a form of defence against the poverty of much contemporary discussion of issues around immigration.
If connecting scholarly research to public debates was simply a question of making information available, a selection of articles and book extracts taken from scholarly journals and the output of academic presses might have sufficed. However, the conventions of academic writing do not make such a task straightforward. Scholarly credibility is the main criterion for publication, sometimes at the cost of intelligibility: jargon is tolerated and a great deal of knowledge is assumed. Academia has its own internal reference points and debates which readers need to be familiar with in scholarly contexts. These are often of little interest to those looking for insights into wider social questions. There is a long-standing disconnect between the concerns of academia and the major questions of our time. It seems to us that it is urgent to address this issue and offer a response to the rhetorical questions asked by Roszak when, fifty years ago, he diagnosed a dysfunction at the heart of scholarly endeavour that is still in evidence today:
The training of apprentice scholars and the pursuit of research â as these activities are presently handled â result in a great deal of mindless specialisation and irrelevant pedantry that ought not to be credited with intellectual respectabilityâŠIs it more âknowledgeâ of this surplus kind, expertly gleaned by precise techniques, that we really require? Or, in the protracted emergency in which our civilisation finds itself, should our highest priority be placed on a scholarâs ability to link his special knowledge or moral insight to our social needs? 6
As well as contributing to debates about migration and the relationship between history and policy, we are therefore also engaging here in a broader conversation about the future of academic research and its audiences.
This is about content but also about form. There would be little point in seeking to reconnect scholarly work to social interrogations if the insights generated were not to be widely disseminated. As Angelika Bammer and Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres argue in the introduction to their collection of essays The future of scholarly writing, the âproblem of communicationâ associated with academic work is a threat to its effectiveness and indicative of a âwriting âcrisisââ in a context where âestablished forms of scholarly presentation (the conventional monograph or peer-reviewed article) are no longer adequate to the needs of the contemporary academy, much less those of the world beyond itâ. 7 In attempting to bring historical knowledge into the public debate on immigration, we have endeavoured to produce a book that speaks to social concerns and addresses at least some of the questions posed by this âcrisisâ.
New forms of communication cannot be expected to emerge fully formed overnight, not least because the way people absorb information in the twenty-first century is constantly changing. The approach used here is necessarily experimental. As editors, we have sought to offer a way forward by encouraging researchers to think about the relationship of their work to contemporary policy debates and to write in a way that makes their thinking accessible to a non-specialist readership. This approach is distinct from traditional academic writing, in that the focus is no longer exclusively on the relationship between the findings of the research and established understanding. It is also at variance with other forms of writing that are not grounded in scholarly research and reflection. We are grateful to the academic historians who have agreed to contribute to this volume and have been open to working in a way that seeks to bridge the traditional divide between the scholarly and the public realms. We have also added editorsâ introductions to each section to guide readers through the book, highlight the policy relevance of the contributions and provide a thread of continuity which explains how the individual chapters all contribute to a greater whole.
We feel that this exercise has shown how much each of these often-separate spheres can contribute to the other. This book is for scholars interested in new ways of conceiving of their research agendas and communicating their work. It is for a general readership open to reflecting on how research into the past might help reshape our understanding of the present. It seeks to point the way to a more fruitful debate between scholars, policy-makers and the general public. The different chapters show that be it within national contexts in Europe, Asia or North America, or indeed at a global level, history has a major role to play: it can be a âmartial artâ, taking its place in political and social struggles surrounding immigration policy. By making these connections, we can also enrich scholarship by formulating new questions. In other words, this task is not solely about transferring knowledge from scholarship to the wider public sphere, it is also about encouraging historians to ask different questions of the past, in light of the challenges of the present.
Book Structure: Going Back to Where We Came From
History, Historians and the Immigration Debate is structured geographically, with three central sections on Australia and New Zealand, Asia and Europe. Two additional sections bookend these case studies. The first addresses the profession of history, the role migration history plays within it and the choices historians make when framing their research. The last takes a step back to consider migration globally. The aim is to offer a global perspective on the relevance of migration history and its future. Naturally, it would be absurd to claim to provide an exhaustive perspective on such a topic. Future interventions from scholars working on Africa and Latin America would, for instance, be very welcome. What we offer here is a first step towards a global conversation on this topic.
A guiding idea throughout the writing and editing process has been to interrogate and subvert that most typical of injunctions directed at migrants: to âgo back to where you came fromâ. The notion that a person âcomes fromâ a single place, and therefore is âout of placeâ when encountered elsewhere, is grounded in perceptions of race, nation and locality which are constructed and historically contingent. To reveal these contingencies, the historians featured here âgo backâ chronologically and present evidence of human mobility which challenges, surprises or shifts perceptions of what is ânewâ or ânaturalâ about migration. Their chapters further academic scholarship while informing debates about immigration and identity within their own national and regional contexts. The question of âwhere we come fromâ has also prompted us to reflect on our own professional identities as historians of migration, and to trace how migration history has developed in relation to the broader field of historical studies. This is a theme that is addressed by a number of our contributors, making History, Historians and the Immigration Debate a useful source for both the past and possible futures of migration history.
Part I of this book, âMoving Migration History Forwardâ, addresses the challenges involved in trying to carve out a role for history in the politics of migration. In Chapter 2, âFrom the Margins of History to the Political Mainstream: Putting Migration History Centre Stageâ, we begin by taking stock of the history of our own field, and of recent articulations of the immigration debate across the globe. Although different in context and detail, the politics of migration in countries including France, Germany, the USA, the UK, South Africa and Australia has in recent years been reinvigorated by popular nativist anti-immigration movements, and in some cases widespread protest against them. We argue that the expertise of historians has become sidelined in these popular discourses, partly as a product of a sub-discipline which has developed as an adjunct to, rather than as a central part of, the histories of nations and...