Migration and the global middle class (original) (raw)
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The Golden Passport 'Russian' EUtopia: Offshore Citizens in a Global Republic
Social Anthropology , 2022
In the face of utopian discussions on global citizenship and cosmopolitan identities, this article argues that the concept of off shoring provides insights into rising realities in elite mobility and the formation of expat communities. I do this in the context of the proliferation of 'golden passport programmes', through which rich people are naturalised as citizens in the countries where they invest. Showing how the global citizenship utopia is materialised locally, I argue that golden passports are the continuation of off shoring by other means. Presenting an ethnographic portraiture of those enabling Russians to acquire the Cypriot passport, as well as how the Russophone community takes shape locally in Cyprus, the article shows how 'expat communities' can form as enclaves of safety that off er off shore convenience for certain elite community members. It also shows that golden passports exacerbate local inequality, undermining the egalitarian utopia of citizenship at large, with detrimental eff ects on the local sense of civitas.
The Current Status of the Privileged Class: A Discussion on Transnational Elite Migrants
In this paper, I discuss how a group of elites in the world, possessors of not only high economic but also cultural and social capital, complicates even the most progressive constructs of multicultural states as they comfortably land on top of conventional class hierarchies in whichever society they infiltrate, even though they may be only confined to the larger and more globally connected cities. This group of elites consists of the small minority of migrants that can be considered virtuosos of neoliberal capitalism, a new tier of people who not only live between nations, between allegiances and homelands, but who also are resistant to permanent lockage in any one context. For them, there is no integration, let alone assimilation, because their distinction is what makes them able to be globally desirable. As this group of transnational globetrotters transgress borders, they inherently do not embed into any one nation or city. And, I further suggest that, as parents around the world placing their children in international schools or schools with global education curriculum, there is no longer a monopoly for Western elites in the transnational economy.
Taking an integrated approach, this unique Handbook places the terms ‘citizenship’ and ‘migration’ on an equal footing, examining how they are related to each other, both conceptually and empirically. Expert contributors explore how citizenship and migration intersect in contemporary thinking, going beyond accounts that often treat the terms separately or simply point out the implications of one term for the other. Organised into five parts, chapters address the basic theoretical perspectives on citizenship and migration, including normative approaches, cross-national differences in citizenship regimes, and methodological issues. The Handbook then moves on to look at the three fundamental dimensions of citizenship: membership, rights, and participation. The final part discusses key contemporary challenges and future perspectives for the study of citizenship and migration. This Handbook will be a valuable resource for scholars and students engaged in the study of citizenship, migration, public policy, human rights, sociology and political science, more broadly. Its interdisciplinary perspective and use of empirical studies will also be beneficial for practitioners and policy makers in these fields. ‘Citizenship and migration have been increasingly important topics in academic research as well as in public discourse. This Handbook connects the two phenomena systematically, looking at migration from a citizenship perspective and examining how citizenship has been transformed through migration. It provides an excellent introduction into the state of art with regard to the membership, rights, and participation dimensions of the citizenship and migration nexus.’ – Rainer Bauböck, European University Institute, Italy and Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria 'With a very well selected set of authors, who span a wide range of conceptual and empirical work on citizenship and migration, this Handbook offers an excellent one-stop resource for all advanced scholars of the subject. It captures well some of the key current debates structuring work in this ever-expanding field.' – Adrian Favell, University of Leeds, UK ‘At a time when the interaction between citizenship and migration comes under intense scrutiny – as the pandemic forces us to rethink who can cross borders, what is the difference between a migrant and a citizen, what are the rights of each and whose work or health is more essential – this is a timely and needed Handbook offering a critical overview of the multiple intersections between migration and citizenship in theory and in real life.’ –Anna Triandafyllidou, Ryerson University, Canada
Journal of Identity and Migration Studies
2014
Migration has always played a requisite role in the history of mankind. At present the intensity and frequency of cross-border mobility are much higher than in previous decades. In addition, many citizens are children of foreigners and belong to the so called second generation of immigrants, these people belonging to two different cultures. The second generation of immigrants is raised and educated in accordance with the value system of their parents’ country of origin. Outside the home, they familiarize themselves with the national society’s value system, while the kind of neighbourhood in which they live may be more or less encouraging. Cultural assimilation occurs when immigrants voluntarily adopt their new country's language and cultural practices to integrate into society and improve their chances of economic and social gain. Sociologists suggest that differences in cultural integration efforts matter less to the formation of acculturation preferences of the second generati...
Citizenship and Transnational Migration
This paper examines how transnational migration, understood as cross-border social fields formed by migrants with their community of origin, impacts on the contours of liberal democratic citizenship. I examine citizenship in terms of membership, rights and identity and I focus on the normative argument made by liberal political philosophers regarding the appropriate response to immigration by the receiving state and contrast this with the notion of transnational migration. This finds that the liberal prescription of facilitating their access to membership of the polity commonly misunderstands what transnational migration actually is, i.e. the ongoing allegiance of emigrants to their communities of origin. This situation places strain on the hyphen between the nation and the state. In the receiving country the liberal argument calls for citizenship to emphasize the individual's relation with the state where they reside and to downplay the national dimension. From the perspective of the sending country the opposite holds true, transnational migration is based on the notion of citizenship as membership of a nation –even when the individual is absent from the state's territorial borders. Transnational migration thus brings out the disjuncture between the notions of citizenship and nationality. This paper explores how the contours of liberal democratic citizenship are affected by the transnational dimension of contemporary migration. There have been two distinct areas in which the term 'transnational' has been applied to citizenship in political philosophy, the first involves normative discussions on the liberal democratic response to the presence of foreign nationals in the national polity, and this is what this paper concentrates on. The other dimension is not directly concerned with migration and instead enquires about citizenship under conditions of globalization (Held 1999, Slaughter and Hudson 2007) as well as cosmopolitanism (Linklater 1999). I will discuss the normative debate on how citizenship policies should accommodate immigration and how transnational migration impacts on the notion of citizenship. Concordantly my research questions have been: how does transnational migration apply to the concept of citizenship –in both receiving and sending countries? Following this, what dimension of citizenship is brought to the fore? This study has undertaken a text analysis of academic material in English using the keywords citizenship and transnational migration. A notable limitation is that these studies concentrate exclusively on the receiving countries of the Western world, although the ongoing role played by the countries of origin is a defining facet of transnational migration studies (Basch et al. 1994, Levitt et al. 2003). Unfortunately, no studies were found from developing countries that focused on how their nationals abroad impact on notions of citizenship. The ontological position of this paper is the continuous