Modes of incorporation and transnational Zimbabwean migration to Britain

In the last decade, the phenomenal growth of Zimbabwean congregations in Britain, responding to conditions in both the hostland and homeland, has received little scholarly attention. This article, drawing from an in-depth study of Zimbabwean Christians and the modes-of-incorporation framework, examines the ways in which the context of reception in the hostland shape, alter and influence the development of religious transnationalism among migrants. As this article will argue, Zimbabweans' mode of incorporation into Britain was mediated by a hostile reception from authorities, considerable prejudice and hostility from the host society and a weak pre-existing co-ethnic community. These conditions in the hostland reinforce migrants' transnational religious ties to the homeland. In addition, the article illustrates the contradictory ways in which respondents reproduce, contest and construct their transnational gendered identities.     

Shifting perspectives on transnationalism: analysing Dutch political discourse on Moroccan migrants' transnational ties, 1960–2010

Abstract

This article examines the Dutch state's shifting perspectives on migrants' ties with their country of origin. In the academic literature transnationalism was introduced as a neutral term. In political debates the term transnationalism is hardly used, but the ties of migrants with their country of origin (to which the term transnationalism relates) are given a strong negative connotation. They are seen as the main course of failed integration policy. In the past fifty years a dramatic shift has occurred in how these ties are perceived. First, they were regarded positively and were believed to facilitate an easy return of the guest workers. Later they continued to be portrayed positively, but were also considered to be a springboard for integration into Dutch society. Recently they have been portrayed negatively and as the main obstacle to integration. This article explores why this dramatic shift in connotation has occurred.     

Rethinking transnationalism through the second generation

The concept of transnationalism was developed to describe the ties maintained by migrants with their homelands and, until recently, little attention was given to the question of whether these ties would be continued by the migrants’ children, the ‘second generation’. This article discusses the transnational practices of second‐generation Tongans in Australia, using the research findings to reconsider some of the existing assumptions about what constitutes transnationalism. To fully understand second‐generation transnationalism, three forms of transnationalism are described: intradiasporic, indirect and forced transnationalism. Taking these forms into account reveals a more complex picture of the transnational ties maintained by migrants and their children than has been drawn in previous accounts.     

Policy actors' narrative constructions of migrants' integration in Malmö and Bologna

Governments have policies explicitly directed at the integration of migrants. This article addresses how policymakers and politicians privilege certain constructions of the social relationship between migrants and the majority society (expressed through narratives of ‘integration’), while making it seem as if they were presenting facts in their policies. These constructions provide the justifications for adopting a direction in policy-making over other alternatives. This article sets to analyse comparatively how policy actors in two urban contexts construct migrants' integration through policy narratives and how, within this, they evaluate migrants as ‘integrated’ and ‘non-integrated’. Through narrative analysis, the article sheds light on how migrants are positioned by political institutions within the normative order of the society in which they live. Furthermore, it shows that local policy-making is shaped by national citizenship regimes, models of steering, welfare regimes and stories about the nation and its people.     

‘Have you got the Britísh?’: narratives of migration and settlement among Albanian-origin immigrants in London

Studies on migration and integration in Britain have noted the paucity of research on ‘new’ migrants, especially ‘illegal’ migrants and asylum seekers. This paper focuses on one understudied group – Albanian immigrants and their children – and looks at their migration and settlement, based on sixty interviews conducted in two phases either side of a 2003 mini-amnesty that gave many indefinite leave to remain. This regularization is the fulcrum around which our analytical narrative is built. Focusing on the interaction of migrants' agency with host-country structure, the paper shows that an unsettled asylum policy and delays in implementation have had deleterious effects on migrants' integration and sense of belonging, even after citizenship acquisition. As they search for a social and ethnic positioning within a multi-ethnic host society, the eventual realization of Albanians' migration project is accompanied by culture shock, intergenerational difference and ambivalence towards integration.     

‘It's not how it was’: the Chilean diaspora's changing landscape of belonging

Abstract

The increasingly diverse character of London's multicultural landscape has shaped how migrants interact with(in) the different spaces of the city. This process entails both settled and incoming migrants' participation in place-making; a mutual imbrication that might promote the long-settled migrants' evocation of a lost terrain. This article unpacks that process by looking at the Latin American social football scene of South London, specifically a space known as la cancha (the pitch). This was founded by Chilean political refugees during the 1970s and it has incorporated Latin American ‘economic’ migrants and ‘local’ Britons through time. Starting from the evocation of a lost ‘golden age’ of la cancha, the paper unpacks this space's contested, complex and changing nature. It presents diaspora space, community and belonging as lived processes. Through this depiction, the assumptions of homogeneous and isolated migrant communities are challenged, as are the diaspora's nostalgic claims that also emerge from them.     

Gender and the dynamics of mobility: reflections on African migrant mothers and ‘transit migration’ in Morocco

By describing the everyday lives of African migrant mothers and their children in Morocco, this paper highlights how migration and ‘immobility’ in so-called ‘transit countries’ are gendering and gendered experiences. Relying on migrants' narratives, the paper demonstrates how migrants' transitions to motherhood create both specific and gendered spaces for agency and particular and gendered constraints upon agency that shape women migrants' mobility dynamics in space and time.     

Thinking Lampedusa: border construction,the spectacle of bare life and the productivity of migrants

This article interrogates the relationship between the Italian island of Lampedusa and trans-Mediterranean migration. It explores how the construction of Lampedusa as a border zone has been implicated in the rise and fall in numbers of migrants reaching the island's shores over the last two decades. It proceeds to consider the appropriateness of interpreting death and detention on Lampedusa in terms of ‘bare life’. While acknowledging how Giorgio Agamben's formulation of bare life has been problematized in relation to irregular migration and taking into account the frequent acts of migrants' political agency on the island itself, it is argued that the transformation of Lampedusa by the media and political establishment into a spectacle of bare life is not only instrumental to the functioning of migration management at Europe's southern border but is also constitutive of the subordinate position of migrants in Italian society and its labour market.     

Existential Displacement: Health Care and Embodied Un/Belonging of Irregular Migrants in Norway

Drawing on fieldwork and interviews in Oslo and Bergen, Norway, this article discusses irregular migrants’ experiences of existential displacement and the tactics they use to try to re-establish a sense of emplacement and belonging. More specifically, it argues that irregular migrants’ experiences of embodied unbelonging are a consequence of a violent form of governmentality that includes specific laws, healthcare structures, and migration management rationalities. The article makes this argument by tracing how these experiences translate into embodied effects that feature prominently in migrants’ narratives of suffering while living in a country that purports to provide welfare services to all. The narratives of their state of being-in-the-world are ways through which migrants both experience and express the violence and deprivation they face. I argue that these narratives are instances of structures of feeling (Williams 1973), which are shaped by modes of governmentality. The article shows that irregular migrants’ coping strategies centrally involve faith, religious communities and friends. Irregular migrants draw on these relationships to get by, access healthcare, and to resist the (health) effects of social deprivation and political violence. These relationships allow irregular migrants to find meaningful ways of being-in-the-world and rebuilding, to some extent, a sense of entitlement and belonging.

     

Theorizing transnational immigration: a critical review of current efforts

During the past decade, transnationalism has entered the lexicon of migration scholars. As with other terms used in the study of immigration and ethnicity, this concept suffers from ambiguity as a result of competing definitions that fail to specify the temporal and spatial parameters of the term and to adequately locate it vis-à-vis older concepts such as assimilation and cultural pluralism. This article offers a review and critique of the ways the term has come to be employed at the hands of key spokespersons that have articulated the most sustained theoretical rationales to date for transnationalism as a conceptual construct to account for new immigrant identities and communities. The conclusion of the essay offers in schematic form an alternative assessment of transnationalism that locates it as one potential subset of assimilation theory, rather than as an alternative to it.     

Entrapped transnationalism: West Bank and Israeli Palestinians between closeness and distance

Studies of transnationalism typically frame it in opposition to the entrapping effects of borders. Yet, for many people, transnationalism is negotiated in contexts marked by forced separation and differential mobility. Drawing on long-term fieldwork among West Bank and Israeli Palestinians, this article explores transnational ties and orientations in relation, not in opposition, to the entrapping effects of borders. Specifically, I examine the two-way traffic in emotions and perceptions that marks family, social and symbolic relationships between West Bank and Israeli Palestinians. I show how entrapping and transnational processes combine to generate a tense interplay between closeness and distance, solidarity and estrangement. The paper calls attention to complex transnational formations among people prone to entrapment such as detained and deported migrants, refugees and minorities divided by rigid borders, and it suggests that a focus on emotions and perceptions is critical if we are to understand such formations.     

Strategies of segregation: race,residence, and the struggle for educational equality

This article discusses the relationship between the socio-economic success of the Chinese in Canada, news discourse and the problematization of nearly 600 undocumented Fujianese migrants who arrived on Canada's western shores from July-September 1999. Our interests rest in examining the thematic patterns of the coverage, i.e. how the migrants' arrivals were 'problematized' and transformed into a discursive crisis centred on the constructs of 'risk' and, more precisely, 'risk avoidance'. It is our contention that news reporting on the migrants holds broader ideological resonances, extending beyond a unilateral concern about the perceived failure of the Canadian immigration and refugee systems. We argue that the reporting of these events serves as an index for collective insecurities stemming from social change, racial integration and contested Euro-Canadian hegemony.     

Trans-Kemalism: the politics of the Turkish state in the diaspora

Abstract

In contrast to the huge amount of research on Turkish migration and migrants, the diasporic politics of the Turkish Kemalist state constitutes a neglected research subject in the scholarship on Turkish diaspora. How does the Turkish state reach out to its nationals and expatriates abroad? In what ways does the Turkish Republic seek to make Islam (as it does in Turkey) into an instrument legitimizing its politicizing and mobilizing enterprises? To explore these questions, this article investigates the long-distance Kemalism engaged in by the Turkish state to Turkify and secularize its nationals in the diaspora, using its activities in Australia as its case study. In sketching out trans-Kemalism's dimensions, the analysis directs attention to the intimate relationship between the political and religious fields of transnationalism manufactured by the state. The paper concludes that the intense political polarization in Turkey in the present makes the future of trans-Kemalism abroad somewhat uncertain.     

Training for transnationalism: Chinese children in Hungary

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in the mid-2000s, this article discusses the educational strategies and emerging trajectories of Chinese children born or raised locally in Hungary. Born to small entrepreneurs who migrated to Hungary in the 1990s, these children exemplify a second generation issuing from a migration taking place in conditions sharply different from earlier migrant flows to Western Europe, North America and Southeast Asia. This first migrant generation came of age in the post-reform People's Republic of China (PRC) and generally maintains both Chinese citizenship and a political and emotional identification with the PRC. Based on findings in Hungary, this article argues that this cohort of migrants' children is being trained for a sustained transnationalism rather than for a minority position in the society of residence, and that, at least in countries that are semi-peripheral for global capitalism, this training appears to be largely effective.     

The early history of migration and settlement of Yemenis in Cardiff, 1939–1970: religion and ethnicity as social capital

Utilizing Putnam's concept of bonding social capital, this article explores the under-researched topic of the history of migrant men's reproduction of social capital in Cardiff, Wales. Drawing upon a series of oral history interviews with a respected imam of more than fifty years, and informed by existing research on Muslim migrants, we explore both the advantages and disadvantages of community relationships between Yemeni men in relation to trust, reciprocity and interpersonal well-being. By examining these complex bonds, this article contributes to the literature on religious and ethnic social networks by challenging the assumption that migrants always benefit from social resources (Wilson 1978; Shah 2007), and offers an alternative account of religiously underpinned social capital to those of studies of majority ethnic Christians in North America (Smidt 2003). Uniquely, this article also points to the divergences between religious and ethnic capitals in the context of Yemeni migrants' social resources during 1939–1970.     

Homeland origins and political identities among Chinese in Southern California

Abstract

This research project seeks to understand the scope and sources of ethnic and other political identities among US residents of Chinese descent whose families originated from the Chinese mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia. In what ways, to which extent and why do these individuals from various homeland origins identify themselves politically in the United States? Informed by past research on ethnic identity formation and political transnationalism, this research analyses a large-scale public opinion survey of Chinese in Southern California to report the contours and sources of political identities and their relationship to homeland origins, transnational ties and adaptation experiences in the Unites States, while controlling for the influence of sociodemographic factors. By separating out socialization contexts and types of transnational practices, the findings provide important modification to the scholarship on immigrant assimilation and transnationalism.     

Performing the Nation: Unauthorized Mexican Migration and the Politics of Language Use and the Body along the US–Mexico Border

ABSTRACT

Given the harsh environment for Mexican migrants in the US state of Arizona, migrants must think carefully about instantiating their identities in White public space through clothing, bodily movements, and language. This article explores the ways some unauthorized Mexican migrants in Arizona perform belonging to the USA by performing Chicano. Performing Chicano means passing as a US citizen, and migrants’ well-being can depend upon the recognition of those performances. Other unauthorized migrants perform the Supermexicana, to pass as Mexicans who are shopping in the USA, and need to hide the fact that they clandestinely live there. This article examines how some migrants perform a commitment to the USA in public while privately disavowing it, and how others perform a commitment to Mexico that they simply cannot have. This analysis argues that the experiences of unauthorized migrants in the USA can be productively seen through the lens of national performativity.     

Migrant warriors and transnational lives: constructing a Gurkha diaspora

The Nepalese Gurkhas have often been regarded as brave warriors in the scheme of British military recruitment since the 1800s. Today, their descendants have settled in various parts of South East and South Asia. How can one conceive of a Gurkha diaspora, and what are the Gurkhas and their families’ experiences of belonging in relation to varied migratory routes? This paper locates Gurkhas as migrants by deliberating upon the connection between military service and migration paths. I employ the lens of methodological transnationalism to elucidate how the Gurkha diaspora is both constructed and experienced. Diasporic consciousness and formation undergo modification alongside subsequent cycles of migration for different members of a diaspora. The article thus evaluates the transnational lives of migrants, and how these are connected to re-territorialized dimensions of identity and belonging.     

“I should not forget!”: qualitative evidence of social and cultural transnationalism among refugees who are disconnected from home

Adding to the growing body of literature exploring the ways in which forced migrant populations engage in transnationalism, we operationalize transnational cultural reference points within a refugee community in an agricultural US mountain-west town. We present qualitative evidence of ways in which refugees retain strong symbolic ties to their homeland while also integrating into the new host culture. Data drawn from interviews and field observations with recently resettled Karen and Karenni refugees yield evidence of cultural transnationalism in self-identification, native language use, clothing, and other symbolic ties to home. The transnational optic as applied in this study reveals the broadening application of the theory to include transnational cultural reference points among migrants who are disconnected from their origin cultures.     

Home Visits: Transnationalism among Australian Migrants

As a perspective developed primarily in anthropology, ‘transnationalism’ has until recently been dominated by ethnographic and textual analyses. While not problematic for any particular study, the overwhelming dominance of these methodologies has created two major theoretical shortcomings; a tendency to inflate the prevalence of transnational models of living, and the attribution of an egalitarian or emancipatory character to transnationalism, generally in the absence of systematic evidence. In this article we attempt to remedy these problems by examining the frequency and determinants of one tangible indicator of transnational activity in migrants to Australia: visits home. Our results suggest three important conclusions: 1) not all migrants visit home at all, and only about 11 per cent do so on a regular basis; 2) there are major between-group differences in migrants’ capacity to visit home; and 3) the earlier concepts of assimilation and migration order are of substantial significance in understanding transnationalism.