migration

Migration, society and globalisation:introduction to Virtual Issue

Adrian J Bailey1 and Brenda S A Yeoh2

1Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong KongEmail: [email protected] of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Revised manuscript received 5 February 2014

Introduction

The 11 papers in this collection consider the changingrelationships between migration, society and globalisa-tion.1 While migration studies continues to illuminateclose connections between international migration,social inequality and cultural politics, scholars of glob-alisation and its unevenness are increasingly attuned tothe transformative nature of migration. Debates aboutthe changing relationship betweenmigration and societyare equally debates about the changing relationshipbetween migration and globalisation.

A significant corpus of scholarship has developed inthe pages of Transactions that directly and indirectlyadvances geographic perspectives on these debates.Broadly searching for articles dealing with some aspectof international migration led us to no less than145 original contributions published in Transactionsbetween 1955 and 2012, inclusive. Looking at thetiming of these articles and how often they have beencited suggests that the discipline of geography hasactively participated in the widespread acceleration ofscholarship on international migration observed widelyacross the social sciences and humanities. For example,while 45 (31%) articles on international migration werepublished in the first half of the period, most (69%)post-date 1984. Even though their gestation period isshorter, these more recent contributions account for 81per cent of the overall citations to the 145 articles. Thearticle with the highest count of citations in the backissues Ceri Peachs (1996) provocative considerationof Does Britain have ghettoes?, which uses a demo-graphic approach to connect social inequality, segrega-tion, migration and ethnicity is, paradoxically,something of the exception proving the rule aboutthese more recent articles that, typically, insinuateglobalisation into an analysis of migration and society.

Our twin goals are to identify and describe themesin geographic scholarship on migration, society andglobalisation, and to briefly comment on how such

themes emerge. To do this we considered in depth thearguments of a sample of 11 articles. With the assistanceof a graduate research assistant, we compiled an initiallist of 30 articles, each of which addressed our topic andhas a wide sphere of influence. Re-reading andsummarising these articles helped us identify two broadthemes: papers that addressed how migrant subjectiv-ities develop across and through space; and papers thatexplored how transnational migration, place and thepolitics of identity are linked. We then selected 11articles that captured the breadth of each theme, werewell cited, and that, read alongside the others, couldsuggest something about the connections that have beenmade (and missed) as the theme emerged.2 To tracesuch threads we tend to present our summary in historicorder, although we start in the middle with onecontribution that is explicit about the epistemologicalchallenges with which many articles continue to wrestle.

Migration, subjectivities and space

To the extent that authors seek to engage with debatesabout migration, society and globalisation throughperspectives that interrogate space, then David Leys(2004) contribution on Transnational spaces and every-day lives has surely proven pivotal. While some of theargument had already been established outside geogra-phy (including Michael Peter Smiths 2001 Transna-tional urbanism), and Leys work is often cited as a callfor the recovery of agency in otherwise top-down andsterile accounts of how migrants inhabit the places ofglobalisation, what remains trenchant is a sense of Leysambivalence and hesitancy in how to bring the globaland the local into a geographical perspective ontransnational migration. Critical of the taken-for-granted binary structure of the terms global and local,and their implicit scaling, he asks how relations betweenthe global and local might dissolve and de-territorialisewhen the lives and subjectivities of actual migrants arestudied. He remains equally suspicious of hybrid third

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion ofthe Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). ISSN 0020-2754 Citation: 2014 39 470475 doi: 10.1111/tran.12056 2014 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

space re-territorialisations, deftly citing examples ofhow supposedly footloose transnational capitalistsbecome trapped and vulnerable, and cases of how theeveryday lives of white cosmopolitan migrant subjects ingentrified neighbourhoods in Australia show not auniversal celebration of difference, but a particularistclosing and exclusion. In more than hinting that thelocal remains the site of politics and in trading onedualism (global/local) for another (transnational space/everyday life), Ley suggests wide bounds about how anepistemology of local and global specifically, and spacemore generally, might underpin geographic perspectiveson migration, society and globalisation.

In this light, Findlay et al.s preceding (1996) accountof the subjectivities of skilled international migrants inHong Kong in the 1990s provides helpful empiricalinsights into at least two ways in which space matters.The authors recognise that the movement of peopleover national borders responds to globalisation and,through what is described as business culture, influencesthe places of globalisation and expectations for businessstrategies and future recruitment. A survey of personnelmanagers in Hong Kong electronics firms showed howtechnical expertise was a valued and culturally con-structed subjectivity assigned to expatriate work perfor-mances. Crucially, the construction leveraged a putativeinternationality of expatriates, giving them an unspo-ken advantage over otherwise similarly qualified butlocalised Chinese workers. Concerning space, thepaper argues that the geographic concentration andassembly of migrants with particular characteristics inselected locales (world cities) reinforces the develop-ment of particular subjectivities. Moreover, the authorsalso contend that the spatial proximity of labour poolsand high employment mobility between firms spreadsand reinforces subjectivities as part of a sector-wide,then city-wide business culture. There are the seeds ofan argument about socio-spatial structures of pathdependency under globalisation that, perhaps, offerspurchase on continuing debates about how context andcontingency come to be produced and reproduced, bothin particular places (Ong 2006) and at particularmoments (Bauman 2007).

The paper by Mitchell (2003) explores how assump-tions about the spaces of globalisation affect migrantsthrough the values that national governments seek toinculcate in their citizens. She describes how educationpolicy in England, Canada and the USA references andproduces an idealised global landscape of mobility.Against this imagined spatiality, education policy instilsin stay-at-home residents subjectivities that equip themto work alongside in-bound migrants. Potential out-migrants are encouraged to develop subjectivities fit forthe purpose of conducting their lives offshore: theseindividuated mobile (motile?) citizens are strategiccosmopolitans who can compete effectively by bringing

a multicultural subjectivity to the global world outthere. The argument reflects on how the structure ofsuch subjectivities enables potential migrants to exploitan imagined globality (cf. internationality, above) forthe economic benefit of metropolitan society: individ-ual strategic cosmopolitans cultivate a sense of indi-vidual patriotism and strategic entrepreneurialism, andare able to be a nodal agent in the expanding networksof the global economy (Mitchell 2003, 400). Bypositioning multiculturalism as serving national inter-ests under an expanding neoliberal project, the paperprovides foresight and traction for understanding whyand where discourses about multiculturalism turnedbad as the global recession began to bite in 2008. It alsoreveals how contingent differences between discoursesin England, Canada and the USA are partly traceable tothe governments self perceptions about their relativeposition in the world (i.e. their spatial imaginary).

Larner (2007) similarly reflects on how nationalgovernments seek to influence migrant subjectivitiesusing spatial imaginaries that reference globalisation.She takes the case of New Zealands diaspora strategyto illustrate how the production of global migrantsubjects is entwined with the production of globalspaces and networks, and is an explicit part of howstates re-territorialise. She describes how a Kiwidiaspora is imagined as a networked space, as avoluntary space where co-option is more effective thancoercion, as an intermediated (contingent) space and(like Ley 2003 above) as an exclusionary space.Crucially, Larners global subject becomes a strategiccosmopolitan by acting as a network cosmopolitanconcerned with overwhelmingly economic (knowledge)agendas. Her paper therefore broadens the treatmentof space by highlighting two forms of contingency:subjectivities produced relative to the position of thestate in the world (for example, as Findlay et al. 1996and Mitchell 2003 above); and subjectivities producedrelative to new institutionalisations of formerly oppor-tunistic expatriate networks (Larner 2007, 331). Thepaper also advances knowledge about the mutualrelations between the production of mobile subjectsand global spaces by recognising that the production ofcontingencies is deeply implicated in the production ofsocial life (cf. Ettlinger 2011).

More recent articles on migration have expandedtheir gaze beyond political economic structures toconsider how subjectivities emerge in social and culturalsettings. Such accounts have attended to social class andfamily contexts, as seen by a recent glut of articles on theinternational migration of students (see also virtualissue on Geographies of Education and Learning,Holloway and Jons 2012). Waters (2006) argues thatthe strategies of middle-class Hong Kong parentsseeking to educate their children in Canada aremotivated by a place-based class battle for access to

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ISSN 0020-2754 Citation: 2014 39 470475 doi: 10.1111/tran.12056 2014 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

an imagined spatiality that is global (and one notunconnected to the idealisation described ten yearsbefore by Findlay et al. 1996). In a still all-too-rareexample of following the transnational action, sheinterviewed 50 post-secondary immigrant students inVancouver and 28 returned migrants in Hong Kong whohad post-secondary experience in Vancouver. She foundthat overseas education built cultural capital andreproduced class position through access to humancapital (i.e. particular academic degrees) and throughparticipation in a transnational field. Student migrationis read both as a socio-spatial strategy, i.e. as a means toan end of capital accumulation, and as constitutive of atransnational social field, i.e. as an end in itself. As such,migration and its spatial imaginaries interweave andrender inseparable the economic and social futures ofgenerations through new forms of transnational (family)arrangement: migration, society and globalisationbecome embedded and scaled in life-courses, linkedlives, and social relations. Waters (2006) also revealsthat while cultural capital has value in particular places,it derives much of that value not from the characteristicsof the place per se but from the general and positiveculture flowing through a transnational social field thatconnects (and un-connects) these places. Read along-side Findlay et al. (1996), the implication is that migrantsubjectivities may be involved in the switching on andoff of capital and value through the economic and socialarticulation of place-based contingencies.

Findlay et al. (2012) are most recently concernedwith what has become a fast-growing source of capitalaccumulation, the global education marketplace, andanalyse the motivations and meanings associated withinternational student migration. The authors discuss ifand how new patterns of inequality and socio-spatialdifferentiation are emerging as international studentmobility becomes a life-course aspiration and a meansto accumulate cultural capital (cf. Waters 2006).Looking at British-educated secondary students whoseek degrees outside Britain, the authors find thatstudent migrants make sense of their decision with atransnational idealisation of the localglobal binary:that is, students seek subjectivity and distinction that issimultaneously local and global. Furthermore, in theircorporate efforts to attract students, universities in theglobal education market both attend to the degree itselfand to its broader geo-cultural trappings: they ask,quite literally, how are we a world-class university? Aselected set of such World Universities see theirdegrees both as a national ticket to class privilege andas a gateway to being a member of the elite world class(or, as Sklair noted in 2001, a transnational capitalistclass). For Findlay et al. (2012), further inequalitiesmay develop along social and spatial axes as, forexample, most international students are from better-off backgrounds, and have moved before.

Transnational migration, place-(un)making and the politics of identity

The geographers craft in cultivating connective tissuesbetween migration, society and globalisation isreflected in a second set of Transactions papers thattakes seriously the politics of place and place-making.May (1996) is an early paper that signalled the rise ofgeographers interest in the multicultural global cityand, drawing on London as a specific example, exploresthe heightened politics of place-making within increas-ingly diverse urban settings. Taking stock of the DavidHarvey versus Doreen Massey debate in the early1990s, May (1996) draws on his study of an innerLondon neighbourhood to challenge both Harveysaccount of the way processes of globalisation lead to adissolution of place and the rise of reactionary place-bound politics and Masseys argument for the possibil-ity of a more progressive sense of place. Instead, theimaginative geographies of place constructed around aset of local class divisions and reflecting powerfullyracialized notion[s] of place and identity give rise to anew cultural class of urban fla^neurs who search for andsample difference as a lifestyle aesthetic withoutopening up a more progressive place identity (May1996, 205). Such insights that provide a more nuancedaccount of place politics cohere with those of othergeographers interested in the contemporary urbancondition of the 1990s. These include Amin andGrahams (1997, 41718) attempt (also published inTransactions) to coin a new term the multiplex city togive emphasis to the co-presence of multiple spaces,multiple times and multiple webs of relations, tyinglocal sites, subjects and fragments into globalizingnetworks of economic, social and cultural change. Alsosignificant is Fincher and Jacobs (1998) influentialbook Cities of difference that brought together geo-graphical accounts of the connections between thestructure of urban space and identity politics in thecontext of multiplying difference along axes of race,ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and able-bodiedness.

Knights (1996) draws together two scales of analysis the geopolitical and the micropolitical to account forthe development of the Bangladeshi immigrant com-munity in Rome. Making the point that unlike postco-lonial migrations, Bangladeshi migration to Italy is notforeshadowed in any way as the two countries previ-ously had little to do with one another, the authorargues that it is symptomatic of the new globalizationof migration processes which sees ethnic communitiesestablishing themselves with extraordinary rapidityin other parts of the world (Knights 1996, 105).Immigrant communities are sculpted by the widergeopolitical context reflecting the transition over thedecade of the 1990s from relatively laissez-faire policiesof the Italian authorities to a more restrictive regime

472 Adrian J Bailey and Brenda S A Yeoh


with the collapse of communism in eastern Europe.External geopolitical change is intimately linked to amicropolitics of place within the community, wheresocial hierarchies are consolidated based on patronclient networks, chain migration and informal sectorwork among rank and file members of the community.This paper, while less noticed than May (1996),signalled growing research interest in migrant commu-nities and transnational linkages in the Europeancontext (see, for example, Samers 1998).

Within the pages of Transactions a decade later, Mayand his colleagues (May et al. 2007) revisited London asa global city, this time by developing the notion of anewmigrant division of labour. While the migrant hadremained a silent figure as part of the backdrop in theearlier 1996 article (the focus was principally on theperspectives of the English (white) residents), the 2007paper foregrounds the place of the migrant in adiversified urban labour market fuelled by rising levelsof immigration and heavily dependent on low-paidmigrant labour. Building on Sassens (1991) Global CityHypothesis, May et al. (2007) makes the case that thenew migrant division of labour emerging in Londonwhere low-waged migrant labour sustains a new reservearmy of labour is not only driven by global economicrestructuring processes but also accentuated by statewelfare, labour market and immigration policies. Thestates approach to managed migration based on astrict hierarchy of classes of entry and associatedprivileges ranging from the right to settle for the highlyskilled, to only temporary admission with no rights tobenefits for the low skilled does not only entail atechnocratic solution but is also a means to manage anincreasingly unmanageable political problem in orderto safeguard its own legitimacy (May et al. 2007, 157,162). This critique, also further developed in a widerange of publications by one or more of this group ofauthors, resonates with analyses of immigration-labourregimes elsewhere (see Yeoh (2006) on Singaporesbifurcated labour, for example) and has spawned newresearch interest in temporary migration in the West(for example, see McDowell et al. (2009) for an analysisof the expansion of forms of insecure work, the impact ofrising numbers of economic migrants and the emergingmigrant division of labour in UK labour markets).

Reflecting this interest in temporary migration,Smith and Winders (2008) draw on the case of Latinomigration to cities in the American South to explorethe politics of place and place-making in terms oftensions and disjunctures between capitalist demandfor flexible, temporary, low-waged, unauthorisedlabour on the one hand, and the immigrants socialreproductive needs and claims to place and identity onthe other. Drawing on bifocal conceptual lenses of thebody and place, the paper illustrates the significance ofgender in the placing of migrant bodies:

while the laboring immigrant body coded as male andtemporary is ghost-like and fleetingly present on worksitesin construction, landscaping and other sectors across theSouth, the reproducing immigrant body coded as female andpermanent is difficult to contain, lingering in grocery stores,playgrounds, health clinics, and other public but, none-theless, domestic spaces. (Smith and Winders 2008, 66)

Tensions between immigrants and long-term resi-dents are best understood by taking into account theentanglements between the embodied demands of newlabour practices under neoliberal globalisation and theequally embodied presence within quotidian spaces ofsocial reproduction.

As interest in race, difference, otherness, minoritiesand multiculturalism widened as transnational migra-tion increased in both volume and velocity during thefirst decade of the new millennium, scholarly attentionbeyond the signature global cities was also consoli-dated. In contradistinction to the emphasis on tempo-rary migration discussed above, a major vein of theliterature reflecting the experience in western citiescontinued to focus on the uneven geographies of ethnicsettlement within cities. While acknowledging a gene-alogy that harks back to pioneering quantitative workby geographers such as Peach (1996), Phillips et al.(2007) turned previous work on minority ethnicsegregation on its head by re-examining the issue fromthe perspectives of South Asian groups in Leeds andBradford (two cities that experienced the 2001 distur-bances). The paper opens up diverse representationsand experiences of urban space by giving weight to thenarratives of British South Asians in expressing viewson their sense of community, feelings of belonging,residential mobility and ethnic mixing against a back-cloth coloured by normative assumptions about thewhiteness of the city. Discussion on these issues hasalso continued to gather momentum, as seen in a raft ofpapers on geographies of segregation and territorialstigmatization, including several published in the pagesof Transactions (see, for examples, Slater and Anderson(2012) and Smith (2012)).

Conclusion

International migration has accelerated as a focus ofpublished research in the Transactions. The papers inthis virtual issue explore how such migration isintimately and simultaneously linked to transforma-tions in society and globalisation. Once couched as ademographic response to political economic processes,debates about international migration acknowledgeits broader constitutive roles in social and culturalprocesses and practice. Two emerging themes thataddress interdependency suggest space and placematter through the production, articulation and nego-tiation of migrant subjectivities, and through links



between transnationalism, place and a politics ofidentity. Research on subjectivities has expanded itspolitical economic focus to the social and cultural;considered the role of governments, governance andgovernmentality; and offered insights into how migra-tion perpetuates structural inequality. Our papersfurther demonstrate the multi-scalar politics of place-(un)making in the context of evolving migrationregimes and labour practices, while emphasising thenexus between geopolitical and the micropoliticalprocesses, the productive and reproductive spheres,and ultimately, the body, place and identity.

However, our tracing of how these themes unfoldsuggests somewhat messy geographic renderings. Theparadox of any open reading such as pursued here is the obligation to select or, more negatively, to closedown, restrict and make partial any summative, inter-pretative or connective statement. In many cases aswith the work of Smith (2001) and Sklair (2001) above such closures are occurring across disciplinary lines.What our own partial reading does flag, though, is themerit in Leys earlier epistemological hesitancy. Suchambiguity opened up in productive ways treatments ofspace beyond the restrictive binary of local/global toconsider networks, transnational spaces, the produc-tion of contingencies that are both spatial andtemporal, and the multiscalar politics of place.Perhaps an ethos of hesitancy can yet be cultivatedto encourage progressive accounts that re-discoverearlier and out-of-geography contributions.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Lin Weiqiang for helping us inthe work of summarising and shortlisting papers andthe Editor for constructive feedback.

Notes

1 TheVirtual Issue canbeaccessedonlineat http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1475-5661/homepage/migration_society_and_globalisation_virtual_issue.htm.

2 The selection of the final line-up of 11 papers was basedon a combination of high number of citations and our ownqualitative assessment of the papers scholarly reach andsphere of influence. Pre-1990 papers tend to have muchlower citation figures despite the longer gestation. The factthat three of the 11 selected papers bear a 1996 publicationdate is probably a matter of coincidence, although atanother level, this coincidence also signalled a markedincrease in geographers interest in transnational migrationfrom the 1990s.

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474 Adrian J Bailey and Brenda S A Yeoh


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