Connecting place and placing power: a multiscalar approach to mobilities, migrant services and the migration industry

Abstract

This paper historically situates and explores the strengths of multiscalar analysis, at a moment when the term ‘multiscalar’ has been adopted by researchers within the intersecting scholarships of migration, mobilities, and urban studies. Developed by critical geographers to speak about the intersection of processes of capital accumulation, governance, and urban regeneration, the meaning of multiscalar has become diffuse and conflated with terms such as entwined networks, multisited ethnography and assemblage. Countering these trends, this paper develops as a ‘multisighted’ explanatory framework. A multisighted analysis begins with individual local actors, their motivations and emplacements, and explicates the dynamics of power that extend across multiple units of governance and contribute to processes of capital accumulation. To illustrate the strengths of this approach, the paper draws from a study of the provision of migrant services, which local interlocutors in a relatively impoverished east German city label ‘the integration business’. The arrival of Ukrainian migrants in 2022 is shown to have further enmeshed multiple interrelated individuals, migrant-serving projects, charities, foundations and governmental institutions into networks that supported migrant settlement and became intertwined in a globe-spanning migration industry.