Social Class, Migration Policy and Migrant Strategies: An Introduction (original) (raw)
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Class, Gender and Migration - Amsterdam Symposium
Symposium organized by Saskia Bonjour and Sebastien Chauvin within the "Class in the 21st Century" conference. Amsterdam Research Center on Gender and Sexuality (ARC GS) 22-23 October 2015 University of Amsterdam 1) Class and the policy construction of the (un)deserving migrant Immigration policies create categories of people that distinguish between those allowed to enter and stay in destination countries, and those to whom borders stayed closed. A substantial body of scholarly work explores the ways in which these politics of belonging are shaped by conceptions of national identity, ethnicity and race. Increasingly, there has also been attention to the role of constructions of gender and sexuality in shaping immigration politics. While intersectional approaches to the analysis of immigration policies are thus on the rise, the role of class, and its intertwinement with other axes of inequality, has remained remarkably underexplored. The first two panel of the symposium ask which role class plays in the construction of the ‘(un)desirable’ migrant in political debate and policies. How are different requirements relating not only to income but also to education, housing and even national origin or ‘integration’ related to class? How does class intersect with ethnicity on the one hand and gender and sexuality on the other hand in construing degrees of desirability? Do we observe class serving as a proxy for ethnicity, or vice versa, in political debates and policies? 2) Class in mobility strategies and migration experiences While class figures at various degrees in migration policy, it also shapes the strategies and experiences of transnational migrants. Class defines the resource inequalities that separate those who are able to migrate from those who lack the means to travel. It also determines the array of conditions that drive people to want to leave or not, whether in reference to local competition in origin communities or through classed imaginaries of success associated with destination countries. Together with gender and age, class cultures inform the nature of migration decisions and the types of collective expectations invested in individual migrants. The last two panels of the symposium asks which role class plays in constraining and shaping the agency of international migrants, the differences in prestige between various groups of migrants, and internal conflicts within diasporas. How do class differences translate into various experiences of transnational marriage and family migration? How does class become relevant for asylum seekers persecuted for their sexual or gender identity? Does class play out in value conflicts over gender and sexuality within migrant communities in destination countries? How do migrant men and women navigate and perform gendered and class expectations embedded into host country migration policies? Do policy categories only function as constraints, or can they also become resources to strategize with?
Current Sociology, 2018
The sociological study of class, whether Marxist, Weberian or Bourdieusian, has discussed class systems and individuals’ location in these systems within the framework of the nation-state and has largely ignored the presence of a growing population of international migrants in western societies. At the same time, the emerging literature on transnational migration has largely neglected the question of social class. This article argues that the simultaneous privileging of the nation-state and the neglect of social class by these research traditions, respectively, has been unfortunate. Working from a Bourdieusian class perspective, the article discusses how today’s enhanced international migration – whereby actors regularly cross national borders, physically and virtually, and live their everyday lives in multiple social spaces and class systems – produces class systems in which many actors hold multilocal, inconsistent and instable class identities. The discussion employs a mixed meth...
Workshop Report ‘Forced Migration, Exclusion, and Social Class’
2019
The workshop, initiated and hosted by the Max Planck research initiative on “The Challenges of Migration, Integration and Exclusion” focused on the interrelation between forced migration, exclusion, and social class. This focus was motivated by the observation that previous research on forced migration often hides social class behind other terms, e.g. when refugees are described as “vulnerable”, “poor”, or as “better off”. Only few studies recognised that a forced migrant remains a ‘classed’ person (Van Hear 2004, 2014; McSpadden 1999: 251) and observed that a middle- or upper-class background can ease the start in a host country but also lead to a sense of frustration and “misrecognition” (Kleist 2010: 198) and that a high social status is not always transferrable to the host country (Jansen 2008: 182). The leading question was how a focus on class contributes to the study of forced migration. The contributions span from conceptual work on the overarching topic to specific regional and temporal foci.
Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 2020
Building on the reflexive turn in migration studies, the editorial proposes a conceptual heuristic for studying current conflicts over migration in Europe and beyond. The article integrates a non-essentialist understanding of migration, theories of belonging, membership and boundary-making and perspectives from cross-border studies. It calls to approach multiple social and political conflicts around migration as embedded in struggles over the migration-reladted classifications and powerful discourses of othering. Finally, it provides an overview of the contents of the special issue.
In many recent debates on the political theory of immigration, conflicts between immigrants and citizens of host societies are explored along identity lines. In this paper, I defend the relevance of social class. I focus on two types of conflict, distributive and cultural, and show how class boundaries play a crucial role in each. In contrast to both defenders and critics of freedom of movement, I argue that borders have always been (and will continue to be) open for some and closed for others. The same applies to barriers on integration and civic participation. It is time to return to the connection between immigration and social class and to start carving political solutions that begin with the recognition of class injustice as a fundamental democratic concern.
Owning up to being middle class: race, gender and class in the context of migration
Women & Social Class: International Feminist Perspectives edited by Christine Zmroczek and Pat Mahoney, UCL Press, 1999
Women & Social Class- International Feminist Perspectives. Edited by © Christine Zmroczek, Pat Mahony and the contributors, 1999 Introduction Christine Zmroczek and Pat Mahony This volume presents new ideas about class within an international context. Its particular focus is on women’s theorized experience of social class from a variety of feminist perspectives, contextualized in relation to the countries and regions in which the authors live. The contributors write about their experiences of class in Australia, Bangladesh, Botswana, Britain, Canada, Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, India, Israel, Korea, New Zealand, Poland and the USA. Many of the authors have lived in more than one country or region and are able to make comparisons and illuminate differences and similarities between them. The contributions reveal how varied entire class systems can be from one country to another, from one generation to another in the same country and from region to region. The authors analyze their own understandings of class and the implications for their feminism and for feminist theories in an historical period when capitalist market economics have claimed a globalizing influence and class has been said to be dead. In editing this collection it was our aim to explore how class appears and operates by using experience as the basis of analysis. In particular we wanted to spotlight social class while retaining a focus on its interconnections with other defined and defining social and political categories.
Introduction: Migrants, mobility, and mobilization
Focaal, 2008
This issue brings together the work of researchers who seek to illuminate the class configurations of contemporary global diasporas. Contributions proceed by problematizing the relationship between political mobilization and the class locations of women and men as they negotiate and renegotiate the social conditions under which they make a living as émigrés, people who are subject to and participants in the processes of global change. Although class and culture, as well as mobility and fixity, are often presented as oppositional lenses though which to view global transformations, articles in this issue explore the possibilities for translation of particularized local or cultural concerns into broader collective mobilizations of class activism, nationalist claims, or struggles for entitlement in the circumscribed political spaces migrants seek to create. The gender, ethnic, local, national, and other cultural components of identity and class formation are made explicit as contributor...
When women come first: Gender and class in transnational migration
Social Forces, 2008
This article examines Swedish migrant women to the United States. It asks how racially privileged European migrants adapt to US racial and gender hierarchies that require them to relinquish their economic security and gender autonomy in a neoliberal state? Drawing upon interviews and focus group discussions with 33 Swedish women and three of their spouses, and participant observation between 2006 and 2008 in a network for Swedish speaking women living in the US, the article discusses how a group of 'white' migrant women who arrive in the US with an ideology of gender egalitarianism negotiate a more socially conservative and economically vulnerable lifestyle, as the wives (and potential ex-wives) of upper-middle-class men. The article argues that while Swedish women benefit from their racial and social privileges in the US they lose their sense of economic security, acquiring new anxieties that make them reluctant to renounce their Swedish citizenship which they conceive of as a 'flexible' resource.
In this paper I want to investigate whether EU migration should be viewed in terms of collective action and a social movement or an individual act of resistance. Furthermore, as migrants’ class character is heterogeneous yet underlies the global division of labour, we need to ask ourselves whether migration to the EU possibly even amounts to a form of class struggle. In Empire, Hardt and Negri they write: “A spectre haunts the world and it is the spectre of migration. All the powers of the old world are allies in a merciless operation against it, but the movement is irresistible” (Hardt & Negri, 2000:213). By implicitly referring to Marx’s ‘spectre of communism’ they elevate migration to a global social movement. Moreover, a number of scholars have contended that migration is an act of resistance itself through which the migrant can transcend her/his gender and class position, for example (Bach, 2010; Munck, 2011). In this reading, migrants’ mobility then constitutes a form of power (Alberti, 2014:3). But how does one distinguish between individual acts of resistance and collective action? En route to the EU and within its borders, migrants make use of social networks, family and mobilise other social bonds (ethnic, national, religious). According to Swider precarious migrants develop a type of “bounded solidarity” which upholds between migrants from the same towns, regions and possibly also from the same countries. This kind of solidarity also extends to those employers, businesses from the same country and draws upon old forms of kinship (Swider, 2014:50). What does this mean for how we understand the co-constructive dynamic of labour exploitation and being a migrant? References Alberti, G. (2014). Mobility strategies, “mobility differentials” and “transnational exit”: the experiences of precarious migrants in London’s hospitality jobs. Work, Employment & Society. doi:10.1177/0950017014528403 Bach, S. (2010). Managed migration?: nurse recruitment and the consequences of state policy. Industrial Relations Journal, 41(3), 249–266. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2338.2010.00567.x Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. (First Harv.). Cambrigde, MA & London, UK: Harvard University Press. Munck, R. (2011). Beyond north and south: migration, informalization, and trade unin revitalization. WorkingUSA, 14(March), 5–18. doi:10.1111/j.1743-4580.2010.00317.x Swider, S. (2014). Building China: precarious employment among migrant construction workers. Work, Employment & Society, 29(1), 41–59. doi:10.1177/0950017014526631