Migrant Class Research Articles

Migrating up the World City Hierarchy: Seoul as a World City of ‘Transfer’ for the Latin American Creative Class

This paper focuses on the world city of Seoul as an alternative, temporary destination for creative class migrants from Latin America. The creative class is a concept developed by Richard Florida to describe, "creative individuals whose economic function is to create new ideas, technology and/or creative content." In this research, world city of ‘transfer’ refers to world cities ranked by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) that are of high middle (Alpha) to lower ranking and that become ‘temporary stops’ for the migrating creative classes, whose ultimate destinations are the Alpha+ and Alpha++ world cities. This research namely asks: (1) From the perspective of creative migrants from developing countries, what causes them to leave world ‘transfer’ cities, such as Seoul, and not settle there long term? and (2) What kind of policies can be applied to help creative migrants stay in these cities permanently? Social integration policies should be implemented when trying to further develop a world city’s quality of place. Qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviews with Latin American creative people were employed to demonstrate Seoul’s need for social integration policies aimed at retaining global talent and not just attracting it.

The privilege of the Indian passport (1947–1967): Caste, class, and the afterlives of indenture in Indian diplomacy

AbstractThis article examines the postcolonial Indian state's 20-year-long discretionary passports policy until 1967, often in collaboration with the British government in its efforts to limit growing numbers of Indian immigrants. While a vast scholarship has shown the racialized limits to mobility perpetuated by the passport and visa system against ‘coloured immigrants’, this article considers the Indian state's own restrictions over the emigration of a particular category of its ‘undesirable’ citizens. This passport regime was based on Indian diplomatic notions of the ‘international’ realm as one shaped by the journeys of migrants and imbued with discourses of indenture qua caste. The Indian state sought to prevent the mobility of ‘lower’ caste and class migrants who were deemed to be legatees of the dreaded ‘coolie’ and therefore unworthy of travelling abroad as representatives of India. Such a reading of the postcolonial Indian passport as a document of caste and class privilege goes beyond the existing literature which largely focuses on its use in the context of partition. In so doing, this article posits the histories and afterlives of indenture as a constitutive element in the making of Indian diplomacy, demonstrating that a focus on indenture facilitates a much-needed recovery of the narratives and euphemisms of caste in Indian diplomacy.

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on poverty among Syrian refugees in Turkey

It is a global phenomenon that poverty is an everyday experience which can, however, be found universally amongst minorities, refugees and lower class migrants. All of these groups have in common the lack of access to a ‘normal life’ – an experience which can be even worse in countries where local hostilities are high due to economic scarcity and systemic racism. In this article, the author ranges widely over the poverty confronting refugees in Turkey who have fled the Syrian civil war, not least against the background of the country’s own opaque and inadequate legislation on refugees, which offers only temporary protection and greater precariousness as a result of the lack of formal employment opportunities; the continuing inequalities stemming from neoliberalism; the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic; and amidst the country’s own extraordinary politics. Focusing in particular on the decline experienced in the pandemic in terms of access to education and the decline in access to healthcare, the article concludes that providing real support for the poor is not realistic under existing political and economic approaches.

Whiteness, citizenship of class and educational privilege of Eastern European pupils in British schools

ABSTRACT This paper deconstructs ways in which the white ‘race’ of Eastern European pupils and the class determination of their parents in the country of arrival combine to either afford or deny them racialised privileges in British education. Critically reviewing published research on Eastern European pupils in British schools, this article concludes that past understandings of ‘white middle-class privilege’, developed mostly in research about white middle-class nationals, cannot be applied in the same way to white-middle class migrants. This paper shows that the class and race of white middle-class migrants become re-articulated in school contexts in ways that suggest that, despite being white and middle-class in their home countries, Eastern Europeans cannot be fully white and middle class in the migration setting. Based on these insights, we offer an analytical frame for theorising this observed conundrum, making a contribution to sociology of education, race and migration.

Return Migration from Nineteenth Century Australia: Key Drivers and Gender Differences

This paper sheds new light on return migration from Australia to the UK in the latter nineteenth century. It uses data from shipping records, and from a random sample of the 23,000 Australian‐born in the 1911 Census of England and Wales. Based on these sources, it estimates some 20% of migrants to Australia returned: higher among the wealthy, but still 12% of semi‐ and unskilled working class migrants returned. There was a preponderance of women among returnees. From that, and other evidence such as the geographic spread of returnees across England, the paper argues that social networks played critical roles in decisions to return.

Together in the Same Boat: Exiled Nationalist State and Chinese Civil War Exiles in 1950s Taiwan

AbstractWhen the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power, one million mainland Chinese were forcibly displaced to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek's regime. Today, this event is still largely considered as a relocation of government or a military withdrawal operation instead of a massive population movement. Contrary to popular belief, many of the displaced mainlanders were not Nationalist elites. Most were common soldiers, petty civil servants, and war refugees from different walks of life. Based on newspapers, magazines, surveys, declassified official documents produced in 1950s Taiwan and contemporary oral history, this article uncovers the complicated relationship between the regime in exile and the people in exile. It argues that the interdependency between the two, in particular between the migrant state and the socially atomized lower class migrants, was formed gradually over a decade due to two main factors: wartime displacement and the need to face an unfriendly local population together.

Vicky, Cristina and Social Exclusion in Barcelona: A Tale of Two Cities

Barcelona has become one of the most touristic cities in the world, with more than 18 million visitors per year, coming to a city with only 1.7 million inhabitants. The model of tourism is depredatory, destroying old neighborhoods and pushing Catalans out of the city. At the same time, people from the Global South come to the city, but in more precarious conditions. They find a city that does not welcome them and that puts them in the worst conditions. I want to focus on two movies that present Barcelona as an ill city. On the one hand, we have Woody Allen’s Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona (2008), a movie that shows the upper-class American tourism in a European city. On the other hand, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Biutiful (2010), also starred by Javier Bardem, shows us another story about Barcelona. This is a movie that pays attention to the bottom of the well, Spanish lower-class workers struggling shoulder to shoulder with lower class migrants, people who will never enjoy the life that Allen`s characters have. In this paper I want to show how film can represent illness in different ways. To do so, I first explain, very briefly, the Barcelona model, a model of inclusive, modern city that Vicky and Cristina enjoy. But, this model insofar as it includes people, it excludes them. I will show the construction of the City from 1888 to 1992/2004 and how it has created spaces of inclusion and exclusion. In the second part, I will analyze the right to housing and the housing crisis that is currently affecting the city. In this part, I want to focus both in the crisis and in the social mobilization that it has brought about. After constructing this context, I will analyze the two movies, as instruments to show/hide the diseases of the city.

Climate Induced Migration and Social Mobility Among Migrants: Evidence from the Southwest Coastal Region of Bangladesh

Climate induced natural disasters is a common phenomenon of the southwest coastal region in Bangladesh, where rural-urban migration has been considered as an adaptation strategy to survive from the adverse situation of natural disasters. For this type of internal migration, the migrants face multiple hazards, such as occupational change in destination, poverty, gender discrimination, risk of violence, social inequality, social disharmony and conflict with the host community etc. which influence the individual’s social mobility that may be upward or downward. This qualitative research explores the social mobility of the climate migrants to assess the migrants’ socioeconomic as well as occupational changes. For this study, we have collected the data from the cyclone Sidr and cyclone Aila affected migrants who were migrated internally from the disaster-prone southwest coastal region to the neighboring divisional city Khulna of Bangladesh. After analyzing the primary data, the results have been shown that most of the climate migrants were changed their occupations due to the failure of deriving a secure income in destination places. According to the present socio-demographic profiles and the social status of the climate migrants, poor housing conditions, food insecurity, gender discrimination and structural inequalities in access to properties and control over resources, lack of access to urban culture and identity crisis related with social prestige are created the social disharmony in the society. Most of the rural middle class migrants are shifted in lower class in the context of urban life which indicate downward social mobility caused by climate induced unsuccessful migration.

Living with the enemy – German immigrants in Nottingham during the First World War

This article uses primary sources to examine German immigrants and their descendants in Nottingham during the First World War. This review is placed in a British context with the aid of secondary sources. It finds that a major provincial city with a relatively very small German population replicated what happened across Britain, but with fear for repercussions contributing to an almost total lack of local support and a failure of the migrants to speak out. It also establishes that the business boycott and exclusion that occurred all over Britain came much later in Nottingham, while anti-German violence was less severe and sustained than elsewhere. In Nottingham well-connected migrants in the lace industry continued to prosper. However, many working and lower middle class migrants were interned and deported or left the city, which resulted in a remarkable decline of the German population of Nottingham.

Sentiment and the Restrictionist State: Evidence from the British Caribbean Experience, ca. 1925

THE INTERNATIONAL MOBILITY CONTROL REGIME consolidated in the decade after World War I made intimate sentiment a systematic concern for states policing borders and rights. New U.S. immigration laws in the 1920s made family reunification one of the few routes through which migrants could enter the United States when their home society’s quota was exhausted. (That is, the laws extended to much of the world both the exclusionary stance and the kin- based exceptions pioneered in regard to Asian migrants a generation before. 1 ) Adjudicating the right to cross borders and work now required state agents to assess intimate bonds and the intentions they fostered: the sentimental as well as documentary dimensions of kinship. The impact of this shift was felt sharply in the British Caribbean, which was placed under quota restriction for the first time in 1924, cutting legal immigration from the islands from over ten thousand to under five hundred per year. For migrants and would- be migrants, family acquired a contradictory relationship to state power. On the one hand, family ties became more important than ever in supporting mobility, providing not only resources and support (as had long been the case) but also—for a select few—formal entitlement to entry. On the other hand, kin practice became a key point of vulnerability for working- class migrants, as the U.S. government placed itself in the position of verifying the highly restricted set of family ties that could justify non- quota entry under the new law. Commonplace Caribbean practices like consensual unions, sibling reliance, and informal fostering created bonds given no protection under U.S. immigration law. Moreover, the new state interest created a new venue for intrafamily dispute. Raising the stakes of family ties, the restrictionist regime offered tempting leverage to those struggling with straying spouses, headstrong offspring, or scofflaw siblings. Men and women alike could and did seek to use this leverage, but it was a blunt instrument, unpredictable and often irreversible. Its power to harm was far more consistent than any power to help.

Local Integration Ontological Model of Creative Class Migrants for Creative Cities

<p class="apa">An innovative creative class drives creative cities, urban areas in which diverse cultures are integrated into social and economic functions. The creative city of Chiang Mai, Thailand is renowned for its vibrant Lan Na culture and traditions, and draws new migrants from other areas in Thailand seeking to become part of the creative class. This study aims to classify a local integration model for the migrant creative class, and to suggest a set of indicators that could be used to measure the level of successful integration of a migrant creative class when building creative cities. This study selected twelve creative class sample cases who are well known in Chiang Mai and separated the sample into three groups; educator, researcher, and innovator. The study’s agenda consisted of open-ended questions with a semi-structured format for the in-depth interview, and follows a local integration ontology model.</p><p class="apa">The study found that the local integration model consisted of four key domains: means and work, social connection, facilities, and foundations domains. Significant factors are included in each domain, and all four domains are important for the local integration of the creative class in creative cities. Annotation Ontology was used for determining the critical factors for success for migrants in creative cities: namely job, training, social bridge, and language and cultural knowledge.</p><p class="apa">This study presents a new model, the Lan Na Local Integration Metric, which can be applied to understand the successful integration of migrants into the Lan Na region of Chiang Mai.</p>

Archives of Intimacy and Trauma

Drawing on interviews with self-identified LGBTQ migrants, lawyers and immigration consultants conducted in Toronto in 2008–09 and 2013, this article explores the affective economies of queer migration governance in the transnational Canadian context. With a specific focus on the extensive paper files queer family class migrants and refugees must produce as part of the application process, the article theorizes these carefully curated documents as archives of intimacy and trauma respectively. These archives of intimacy and trauma are technologies of mobility—not only moving migrants across borders, but also moving emotions between migrants and immigration bureaucrats. In aiming to render their subjects intelligible—and intelligibly desirable—to the state, these curations of ephemeral queer intimacies and trauma simultaneously serve as archives of “affective governance,” powerfully illuminating the affective modes through which bureaucracy, calculability, and biopolitics take hold.

Acting White? Or Acting Affluent? A Book Review of Carbado & Gulatiis <I>Acting White? Rethinking Race in 'Post-Racial' America</i>

Acting White? Rethinking Race in “Post-Racial” America (2013) is the latest installment in Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati’s decade-plus collaboration regarding issues of race and employment. This review lauds the book’s comprehensive treatment of the double bind that racial minorities — especially blacks — experience within principally white institutions. In this volume, the authors expand on their prior employment-centered work to consider, for example, Barack and Michelle Obama’s presence on the national political stage, racial identity and performance in the context of higher education admissions, and racial profiling by law enforcement. With a focus on intra-racial diversity, Carbado and Gulati begin to gesture to the intersection of class (more precisely, the struggle for upward class migration) with blackness in the high-brow settings that are the employment staple for Acting White?'s analysis. What Carbado and Gulati overlook, however, is intra-racial diversity among whites. While the authors give a nod to aspects of identity such as gender and sexuality, acknowledging that, like race, these may render individuals “Outsiders,” they otherwise treat whiteness as monolithic, as simply the foil for black identity work. In so doing, Carbado and Gulati overlook the struggle for assimilation that poor and working class whites — aspiring, striving class migrants — experience when they seek to integrate these same “white institutions.” The point is that all employees are expected to assimilate to institutional norms that, in elite professional settings, are as much about class (affluence) as about race (whiteness). I thus suggest that the book might have been titled, Acting Affluent?, although that alternative would have been misleading, too, because the identity work expected in these upscale milieu implicates both race and class. Ultimately, neither the title Carbado and Gulati chose nor the one I suggest is very precise because affluent black identity and affluent white identity are unlikely to be identical. While Acting White? grapples with some very complex and potent intersections of race and class, it looks right past many other such intersections, including that of white skin privilege with class disadvantage.

Roots of Civil Rights Politics in Northern Churches: Black Migration to Saginaw, Michigan 1915 to 1960

The southern-led civil rights movement was an important transformational period in the history of African American life and culture in the USA. While we know much about the social, economic, and political activities that occurred in southern cities in the 10 years preceding the civil rights movement, we know less about how parallel social processes developed in urban northern communities between 1946 and 1960 and how they prepared the black church for radical politics during the civil rights period. Black migration to Saginaw, Michigan serves as a case study to show how middle class migrants were the causal mechanism that secularized black churches through their overlapping memberships in status groups, black churches and secular organizations, and how this population helped to prepare black churches in Saginaw (and much of the north) for radical politics on the eve of the civil rights movement.

THE NATIONAL THING IS A SCENARIO NOT MADE FOR WE THIRD WORLD MASSIVE: A CASE OF WORKING‐CLASS YOUTH ON SAINT MAARTEN & SINT MAARTEN EMANCIPATING THEIR MINDS FROM EXCLUSIVE NATIONALISM

We still live in a world where ethno‐racial nationalisms obfuscate the recognition of our common humanity. This situation is even more alarming when one takes into consideration the predation of working class migrants by unscrupulous agents of global capitalism.For critically engaged anthropologists it is pertinent to track and record the everyday experiments that seek to contest capitalist exploitation and deconstruct the common sense of ethno‐racial nationalisms. Based on ethnographic material collected on the bi‐national Caribbean island of Saint Martin and Sint Maarten, I will demonstrate how working class youngsters employ Conscious Reggae music and Rastafari ideology to cultivate a postnational and anti‐capitalist sense of panhuman belonging.

Public Man and Public Space in Shanghai Today

Public space is a topic of great interest for urban scholars and urban planners. Such space, like parks, sidewalks, and plazas, it is argued, can provide the common grounds where the inhabitants of a city meet, exchange ideas, even engage in a variety of cultural performances. This article reports on fieldwork about the use of public space in Shanghai today. We find a great diversity of uses, ranging from vendors who sell their wares to people who engage in heated and extensive political discussions to performers of Beijing opera and ballroom dancing. We also find that the local authorities use a light, and sometimes covert, hand in their oversight of inhabitants in such spaces. Finally, we discover that powerful social differences and inequalities between native inhabitants and working–class migrants, which have emerged during the period of economic reform and market transition, are now actively in evidence in the quality and use of public space in Shanghai. the article puts these findings within a broader theoretical context, concluding in the end that for many—though not all—inhabitants public man is alive and well in Shanghai.

Vulnerabilities of Highly Skilled Immigrants in Canada and the United States

Despite similar permanent status immigration categories (Economic, Family, and Refugee), the experiences of skilled immigrants in Canada and the United States are quite different. The point system used to select applicants for the Economic Class in Canada makes skilled immigrants vulnerable to a number of perils after the migrant lands. Foreign credentials and work experience are discounted by Canadian employers, who also impose a discriminatory income penalty on minorities. While previous cohorts of Economic Class migrants may have been warned of these perils via reliable migrant networks, new Canadian research suggests that recent cohorts have no such safety net. This article examines the economic integration experiences of Economic Class migrants in the United States in light of the Canadian experiences. The vulnerabilities reported in Canada do not appear to be transferable to the United States, because immigration policy in the US stresses pre-landing employment commitments via employer sponsorship. Accordingly, prospective Economic Class migrants to the United States do not migrate without first knowing how their credentials and “minority status” will affect employment opportunities. However, for the 85,000 skilled workers admitted to the United States on H-1B temporary visas each year, the perils noted in the Canadian experience are relevant, as are a number of additional concerns.

Greece: the modern sequel, from 1831 to the present

Politics: a regime to suit the nation government and people. Institutions: the church the military the economy. Education: the mighty Greek school. Society: peasants the middle class migrants and refugees heroes and heroic deeds crime and impunity. Ideology: fashioning the new nation demarcating the past the return of hellenes Greeks and others. Europe in Greek foreign policy: national geography a northern boundary the frontier beyond war for land.