Adrian Dr Favell - Immigration, Integration and Mobility: New Agendas in Migration Studies

Immigration, Integration and Mobility

New Agendas in Migration Studies Essays 19982014

Adrian Favell

Adrian Favell 2014

First published by the ECPR Press in 2014

Cover image courtesy of Xessma

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ISBN: 978-1-907-301-72-8

KINDLE ISBN: 978-1-910-259-48-1

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Contents

Chapter Six: The Human Face of Global Mobility: A Research Agenda

with Miriam Feldblum and Michael Peter Smith

Chapter Seven: Social Mobility and Spatial Mobility

List of Tables

Table 7.1: Intergenerational social mobility in the five largest countries of EU15

Table 7.2: Proportion of foreign-born residents in EU member states

Table 7.3: Class position of EU stayers and movers (before their movement) by country of residence and nationality

Table 7.4: Patterns of intragenerational class mobility of EU movers

Preface

The ideas and arguments in this book date back to the day in February 1989 when a death threat was pronounced on the British Commonwealth writer Salman Rushdie while I was working at a multi-ethnic inner city school in France; editing was nearing completion the day that European election results announced huge successes for the United Kingdom Independence Party and the French National Front in May 2014. Between these dates and events, questions concerning Islam, multiculturalism, new migrations and free movement in an integrating Europe, have fallen and risen on the political agenda. But throughout there has been precious little clear conceptual or theoretical understanding in public debates and also much academic scholarship about the deep problems involved in our routine understandings of these subjects. Much public discussion is stuck with inappropriate conceptions of migration, integration and diversity, as well as naive sociologies of how economy and society in a regional and global society now work. To hear some politicians in Europe talk, it is as if we are still living through a late nineteenth century period of nation-state building, anchored in romantic, homogeneous, ethnic conceptions of nationhood and citizenship. Yet many of these same conceptions are reproduced unquestioned by academic scholarship, in a sub-field of social science that has burgeoned dramatically over the past twenty-five years while often gaining little depth.

I have always tried to position my work at the edges of the field of ethnic and racial studies or migration studies: as a problematiser of paradigms, or conceptual trouble maker for those engaged in the honourable, but sometimes wrongheaded business of normal science in this field whether qualitative or quantitative. The essays collected in this book thus represent both my fascination and frustration with the massive growth of the field of migration studies, and our notions of immigration, integration and mobility as dominant concerns of our times. I still believe that re-examining these notions and the research that has been structured by them, can key us into some of the most puzzling paradoxes of the modern nation-state, regional integration and globalisation. But as the feeble impact on everyday political debate of so much research shows, migration studies has been able to boom without necessarily accumulating wisdom. As I argue insistently in this book, the international migration studies we have inherited is a necessarily interdisciplinary field. Yet it is squeezed and debilitated by disciplinary divisions caused by reductive research assessment and impact factor pressures; even free of these, there is still precious little talk across disciplines or understanding across national political contexts.