Over the past decade, inequality has re-emerged as a key focus for social scientists amidst rapidly growing disparities in wealth, income and opportunity. Migration and the diversification of societies that it entails are often implicated in this growth in inequality. Indeed, mainstream press and politics often view both migration and inequality as national and global challenges for the twenty-first century (Martin 2013; Wolf 2015). The challenge of migration and inequality reflects growing global economic and social interdependence, demographic diversification, entrenchment of neo-liberal policies and global financialisation, as well as a resurgence of nationalism, political uprisings and conflict (Papastergiadis 2000).
More substantively, migration and inequality are connected in complex ways: people often move to escape real or perceived inequalities but are likely to experience inequalities as a result of migration (Bastia 2013; Long 2015). Consequently, migration manifests in socially and geographically uneven patterns that reflect dissimilar capacities to move, access to information and opportunities, and the work of intermediaries like brokers, as well as the influence of sending and receiving destination policies (Castañeda 2017). In receiving countries, migration works through and generates additional inequalities as migrants fill different social positions and experience varying levels of inclusion into social, cultural and economic life (Card 2009). Current scholarship has tended to examine these manifestations of inequality in migration, principally focusing on differences between migrants and non-migrants. In these debates, there is often a focus on whether nonânative-born persons have different economic and social status. These discussions construct migrants as largely homogeneous ethnically and nationally bounded groups who uniformly experience inequality and discrimination. This framing also belies the increasing diversification of migration and the intersectionality of nationality, status, income, wealth, age, gender and many other differences.
Focusing on a more nuanced account of the relationship between migration and inequality, Intersections of Inequality, Migration and Diversification addresses the intersectional character of inequality between, amongst and within migrant populations. While inequality emerges between migrant and non-migrant populations both in sending and in receiving contexts, we propose that there are also inequalities amongst various groups of migrants defined by nationality, occupation or skill level, legal status and so forth, as well as inequalities within groups of migrants. Paying attention to the multiple and overlapping nexuses of inequality in relation to migration demands a focus on intersectionalityâthe ways in which social differences including but not limited to race, class, gender, legal status, sexuality and age intersect in the production and maintenance of inequality (McCall 2005). In offering a more fine-tuned analysis, Intersections of Inequality, Migration and Diversification also eschews a simplistic view of migrants versus non-migrants or an âethnic lensâ that essentialises people into categorical groups (Glick Schiller et al. 2006).
By focusing in more detail on the relationship between migration and inequality, we make four key contributions. Firstly, we advance an understanding of migrants as heterogeneous subjects and of migration as fundamentally diversifying in terms of both the social and economic make-up of societies. Secondly, we recognise that inequalities take on complex forms in relation to the construction of group identities wherein some patterns and experiences of migration manifest in unequal socio-economic outcomes that overlap with but do not match socio-political incorporation and participation. Thirdly, we argue that contemporary state policy around migration is a fundamental force in the creation of economic disparities between, amongst and within migrant populations. And lastly, inequalities constructed today through migration, which have their own historical legacies, also have significant potential to become increasingly intergenerational and structurally embedded. In the remainder of this chapter, we set about conceptualising the intersectional approach to inequality that we take, situate migration histories in the Aotearoa/New Zealand context, reflect on recent inequality debates and outline the key contributions of the book.
In the Intersections of Inequality
Although the study of inequality is well established in critical literatures that focus on marginalisation and oppression, the recent global interest in inequality may be traced to The Spirit Level (2009) by social epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. The duoâs influential work centred on a specific conception of inequality, namely, income disparities âwithin our own societyâ (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010, 11), noting that the distance between the top and bottom earners within societies is far more relevant than the difference in average incomes between societies (see also, Piketty 2014).
The focus on the âsocial gradientâ and its slopeâsteep or gradualâproliferated research into health, social and political inequalities in what has come to be called the social determinants perspective (Marmot et al. 2008). A social determinants perspective blends both relative and absolute notions of poverty, where it is not so much the absolute income per se that matters, but the opportunities or capabilities that it affordsâthat is, its relative worthâthat are relevant to social outcomes (Marmot et al. 2008). Income inequality is a vicious circle (Frank 2014), is durable (Tilly 1998) and has current and intergenerational impacts (Christophers 2018). Studied thus, income inequality reinvigorated a focus on social justice as redistribution and structural equity at a time when critical research was steeped in the âcultural turnâ or recognition/identity politics of the 1980s and 1990s (Keucheyan 2013). The social determinants perspective envelops, among others, ethnic, gender, age and ability-related disadvantages in complex, interwoven ways, but at its core, income inequality is the fundamental cause.
Balanced against this view is the now well-developed feminist scholarship that rescinds a unitary or singular perspective of inequality for a more complex portrait of pluralised inequalities, and which inspires our approach to migration and inequality (see BĂŒrkner 2012). Arguing against the primacy of any one form of inequality (here, class) or a hierarchical ordering of inequalities, this scholarship asserts that inequality has multiple and even intersectional facets (Crenshaw 1991; McCall 2005; Hancock 2007). The former relates to the arguments led by feminists of colour in the 1980s who strove for recognition of their âmultiple jeopardyâ (King 1988), namely, the experience of simultaneous structures of inequality, âas equally important yet conceptually independent considerations when examining political phenomenaâ (Hancock 2007, 67). Thus, race or gender or class inequalities are presumed to come out of social structures that are a priori, fairly stable, clearly bounded and relatively additive (Palacios 2016). The additive strand categorises people using more than one identity with some consistencyâyoung, low-income...