Foreword

Abstract

Foreword Dominik Treeck Migration has been called one of the greatest challenges of the coming century. The phenomenon, however, is as old as humanity. Indeed, it is striking how important migration has been both as a cause and effect of key events throughout history. The migration of Visigoths that led to the destruction of the Roman Empire in the fourth century; the exodus of more than 60 million Europeans to seek a new life in America; the movement of Jewish refugees to Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s; the population swap between India and Pakistan after partition in 1947; the exodus of Bosnians fleeing the civil war in 1992–95; and the flood of 450,000 Rwandan refugees from camps in Tanzania to their home country after the upheavals of 1994–95. All these are instances of large, visible, and often sudden movements of people. Yet, migration is a daily phenomenon. Thousands of individuals are on the move, quietly, invisibly. A young Turkish man moves to Berlin to work in the construction business; a Chinese family moves to Russia to open a shop; a Sri Lankan girl moves to Saudi Arabia to become a housemaid. Individually, their decisions may or may not have an impact. But cumulatively, they change the world. The term migration evokes many images. Most commonly perhaps, we think of the permanent movement of people or the floods of refugees we see in the news. But the term is much broader and also includes the seasonal drift of workers within a country and temporary migrants, who return after working abroad for a season or a number of years. Why do people move? What determines where they go? And what makes them stay, return, or move on? The most straightforward explanation points to push-factors, including low income and violence in the migrant’s place of origin, and pull-factors, [End Page vii] such as wealth, freedom, and stability in the receiving country. While these are certainly important factors, reality is much more complicated, as Miriam Feldblum and Tamara Woroby explain in their respective book reviews. The individual migrant’s decision often hinges on his beliefs, the presence or absence of a history of migration in his family, his country’s prior relationship with other nations, and a host of other factors. Migration is one important aspect of the trend toward a global system of communications and economic relations. As with other aspects of globalization, including trade, capital flows, and media, it gives rise to immense anxieties. People and governments fear that they will lose control over the governance of their own country and that their lifestyle and heritage will not be preserved—that is, they fear losing their sovereignty. Accordingly, countries that send migrants and, more important, those that receive them, have problems in dealing with migration. The extraordinarily emotional and virulent nature of debates on immigration policy illustrates this point. While it appears obvious that migration has important consequences both for the countries of origin and the countries of destination, the question as to the nature of these consequences and how exactly they play out is much harder to answer. One important aspect of this question concerns issues of identity, belonging, and citizenship. How does migration change the identity of the migrants themselves, and how does it affect that of their host country? Shashi Tharoor, Uri Davis, Yap Mui Teng, and Claude Cahn provide their answers in the section “Identity and Citizenship.” A second strand of inquiry looks at the way immigration countries deal with the inflows of foreigners into their societies. Douglas Klusmeyer analyzes Germany’s immigration policies and that country’s futile insistence that it is not an immigration country—in spite of the blatantly different reality at hand. Immigration policy is also the theme of the contributions by Veit Bader and Elizabeth Wishnick, as well as the book reviews by Kristen Hill Maher and Amelia Brown. Finally, Eva Østergaard-Nielsen looks at Turkish and Kurdish diaspora activities in Germany to understand how migration affects domestic politics in both sending and receiving countries. The collection of articles presented in this volume should provide interesting and thought-provoking reading for anyone wishing to better understand...