Beyond methodological ethnicity and towards city scale: an alternative approach to local and transnational pathways of migrant incorporation. (original) (raw)
2008, Rethinking Transnationalism: The Meso-link of Organisations. Ed. by Ludger Pries.
Ever since Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan (1963) advised us to move "beyond tbe melting pot" in our analysis of immigrant settlement and identity, migration researchers have tended to follow what amounts to a recipe in developing a research design. Choose an interesting gateway or global city, locate an ethnic group, add a research question and mix well. The recipe is much the same, whether the researcher's concern has been to assess the degree of integration into a new locality or to explore the cross-border rela· tionships that migrants maintain or establish. If tbe research follows a transnational paradigm then there may be another site explored as wellperhaps a village in the migrant's homeland. However, whatever the analytic framework adopted, the narrative often moves between data specific to a sampled population within a specific city or set of cities to generalizations about an entire ethnic group and its pattern of settlement witbin a specific nation state. Researchers describe 'vrtlrks" in Germany, "Mexicans" in the United States, "Pakistanis" in England. When processes of migration settlement are compared across nation-states, tben variations in ethnic group settlement patterns are generally explained in terms of various states' different opportunity structures including their public policies.
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