The Other People

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Migration

M. Wilkes Karraker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137296962
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Aus- & Einwanderung

This book offers an interdisciplinary and accessible approach to issues of global migration in the twenty-first century in 13 essays plus an appendix written by scholars and practitioners in the field.

Part I

Migration Studies in the Twenty-First Century

Chapter 1

Introduction: Global Migration in the Twenty-First Century

Meg Wilkes Karraker*

If they were a country of their own, migrants would constitute the fifth most populous nation in the world. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a partner with the United Nations on migration-related issues, at 214 million, international migrants represent 3.1 percent of the world’s population. The percentage of migrants varies widely by country, from a high of 87 percent in Qatar and 70 percent in the United Arab Emirates, to below 1 percent in Nigeria, Romania, India, and Indonesia.1 Although the global recession has substantially dampened immigration to developed countries, one-quarter of the world’s migrants live in Western Europe alone.2 In Australia, Canada, and the United States, respectively, 21.9, 21.3, and 13.5 percent of people are foreign born.3

Between the middle of the nineteenth and middle of the twentieth centuries, international migration was primarily within Europe and between Europe and the Americas. Today, migration is increasingly a worldwide phenomenon fueled by great disparities between wealthy, developed countries and poor, less-developed countries, as well as national and regional conflict. Today, the largest migration streams are (1) from the Caribbean and Latin America to the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, (2) from South Asia and Southeast Asia to the United States, Canada, and Australia (with some to Western Europe), and (3) from North Africa, the Middle East, and Southern Europe to Northwestern Europe (with some to the United States and Canada).4

Reflecting on one country’s long history of emigration, Michael D. Higgins, ninth president of Ireland, summarizes the reciprocated effects of migration, for those who leave and those who stay, as well as their societies.

Those emigrants who left solved two pressing problems: their own and their people’s. By moving out, they very often secured the chances of greater material comfort, not just for themselves but for those who remained. Had they stayed, some would doubtless have been creative contributors, but many for want of employment would have been a drain on the public kitty. Ireland today would look a lot more like an underdeveloped country if the one in two who left since 1841 had remained. And places like North American and Australia might not be quite so interesting or so prosperous.5

Immigrants often face racial, ethnic, and national prejudice and discrimination as they enter new societies, and they and their new countries encounter a myriad of challenges such as social inclusion and integration. At one extreme, until the end of the twentieth century, South Africa’s apartheid represented brutally unequal pluralism among divergent groups. These groups included (1) indigenous black Africans from several tribal groups as well as black African immigrants from other African nations (approximately 80 percent of the population), (2) British, Dutch, French, and German white settlers who began arriving at the end of the seventeenth century (approximately 9 percent of the population), (3) mixed-race (“coloureds”; another 9 percent), and (4) Asians, primarily immigrants from India and China (just over 2 percent of the population). At the other extreme, ethnically diverse countries like the United States and Australia have often presumed an assimilationist ideal for immigration, with mixed success in real practice. In contrast, Brazil is often cited as an example of not assimilation, but amalgamation, while some countries like Canada are moving toward a more egalitarian, pluralistic ethnic ideology.6

Emigrants leaving their home countries under the pall of war, genocide, and other horrific circumstances may feel they have “come from a fire into a fire.”7 For some emigrants, even as they weigh the economic, political, religious, social, and other benefits of leaving the familiar behind, migration remains an equivocal experience. On the one hand, immigration heralds freedom and opportunity. On the other hand, emigration threatens “native identity and intercontinental exile,”8 and reveals a “hole in their hearts, culture shock, the discomfort of the unfamiliar and the fact [of not being] at home anymore.”9 Many emigrants have written of the importance of “home” and the nostalgia associated with such feelings.10 Some of the most evocative images of the pain or grief associated with leaving are reflected in memoir and folklore. For example, the story told of the madrilèno (Spaniards arriving in Argentina), crying as they sailed on the ship crossing the Atlantic, saying, “Good-bye Madrid! Nobody lives there anymore!”11

The Other People seeks to capture the human and social context of the experience of global migration. To set the stage for the chapters that follow, this Introduction commences with observations regarding the structure of global migration in the twenty-first century.

The Structure of Global Migration

Even dramatic statistics such as the IOM’s size of the migrant population worldwide do not paint the full picture of migration. Not all migrants are crossing national borders. In fact, the number of internal migrants is almost four times the number of migrants who have moved to another country. Of those who do move across national borders, over a third move from a developing to a developed country; however, most of the world’s international migrants move between developing countries or between developed countries.12

The stories of human migration are of voluntary (more or less) emigration but also of forced displacement. The IOM estimates the number of internally displaced persons (IDP) in the world at 27.5 million. Sometimes called de facto refugees, uprooted people, externally displaced persons, or just displaced persons, the IOM defines IDPs as “groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border.”13

The year 2011 was a record year for such forced displacements, with 43 million people newly dislocated.14 In the same year, fueled by cataclysms in Republic of Côte d’Ivoire (the Republic of the Ivory Coast), Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and elsewhere, eight hundred thousand people became refugees, the highest number since 2000.15 The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) defines a refugee as someone “who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.”16

Still other migrants call no distinct nation home. The largest minority group in Europe is the Roma (sometimes referred to by the pejorative term “gypsies”). The Roma have lived and traveled across Europe for centuries, confronting discrimination and suffering poverty wherever they settled. European Union (EU) countries like France have engaged in the forced return of Roma to Bulgaria and Romania (which have large Roma populations and both of which joined the EU in 2007), drawing charges that France is compromising the rights of Roma as EU citizens to free movement within the EU.17

To further complicate the picture of migration in the twenty-first century, the migration experience itself is changing. For most of human history, migration has been a journey of no return. Emigrants departed their country of origin never again expecting to see loved ones they left behind. In the late 1860s, when nearly one out of every seven Irish-born persons emigrated from the starvation and poverty that had beset the nation, Irish Catholic country folk had a ritual for this “breaking of earthly ties.”18 Signifying that the emigration of a loved one was the equivalent of death, kin and neighbors came together around what they called “American wakes” to share food and drink, singing and dancing, “a seemingly incongruous mixture of grief and gaiety.”19

In the twenty-first century, migration is less likely to be a one-way passage. Intra-and intercontinental travel has never been more frequent nor, some would say, more convenient. Dangers remain, as witnessed by repeated maritime disasters involving “boat people” trying to reach Australia, the United States, and other countries where they seek refugee status.20 Still, transglobal information and communications technology (ICT) has effectively reduced separations of time and space for many. For migrating persons and those they leave behind, ICT systems like e-mail, Skype, and cellular telephones make ongoing contact a reliable certainty, at least for those who can afford the technology. Although a technology gap remains, one-third of the world’s population uses the Internet and an increasing number of ICT users are in developing countries. In fact, in 2011, 62 percent of the world’s Internet users were in developing countries, where 25 percent of the homes have a computer and 20 percent have Internet access. Moreover, between 2008 and 2010, the cost of ICT services dropped 18 percent globally, while in developing countries the cost of fixed broadband technology dropped by 52.2 percent.21

For some, the passage between receiving and sending country is involuntary. Such is the case with the recent rush of children—an estimated three hundred thousand between 2005 and 2010—who moved south as their Mexican parents chose to return to Mexico or were deported from the United States. These transnational children may struggle with school, peers, and simply fitting in: “I dream, like, I’m sleeping in the United States, but when I wake up, I’m in Mexico.” Marta Tienda, a sociologist at Princeton University and herself born to Mexican migrant laborers, has said, “These kinds of changes are really traumatic for kids. It’s going to stick with them.”22

Those who can or do return to their original homes, voluntarily or otherwise, may experience a sense of normlessness, what sociologists call anomie. Award-winning British-Indian author Salman Rushdie (who became the subject of a fatwā for what some fundamentalist Muslims considered his blasphemy) describes both the provocations and connections experienced by people like himself who move between adopted countries and the country left behind. Rushdie recounts his experience of revisiting his “lost city” of Bombay (now Mumbai) and of being “haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must do so in the knowledge—which gives rise to profound uncertainties—that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.”23

Recent shifts serve as reminders of the dynamic nature of emigration and immigration. After four decades and 12 million immi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Migration Studies in the Twenty-First Century
• Part II: Everyday/Everynight Immigrant Lives
• Part III: Toward Justice
• Appendix
• Notes on Contributors