Globalisation and migration

Globalisation and migration

1. Globalisation’ is the idea that barriers between societies are disappearing, with citizens of different societies becoming increasingly interconnected across national boundaries. Globalisation is the result of many processes, including the growth of communication system and global media, the creation of global markets, the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and the expansion of the EU. Many see globalisation as producing rapid social changes, including the increased international migration. There are several identifiable trends in global migration:

   • Acceleration – There has been a speeding up of the rate of migration: from 2000 to 2013, international migration increased by 33%, reaching 232 million (3.2% of the world’s population).
   • Differentiation – There are many types of migrant: permanent settlers, temporary workers, spouses, and forced migrants. Some have legal entitlement, but others enter without permission. Students are a big group of migrants; in 2014, the UK was home to more Chinese-born postgraduate students than UK-born ones. Before the 1990s, immigration to the UK came from a fairly narrow range of former British colonies. Most of these migrants had a right to settle and become citizens, and they formed a small number of stable, geographically concentrated and homogenous ethnic communities. However, since then, globalisation has led to what Vertovec refers to as ‘super-diversity’. Migrants now come from a much wider range of countries, and even within a single ethnic group, individuals differ in terms of their legal status, culture and/or religion, and they may be widely spread throughout the UK.
     • There are also class differences between migrants. Cohen distinguishes three types of migrants: citizens, who have full citizenship rights, denizens, who are privileged foreign nationals welcomed by the states, and helots, who are considered ‘disposable units of labour power’ and are greatly exploited.
   • The feminisation of migration – In the past, most migrants were men. In contrast, almost half of all global migrants are female today. This has been called the globalisation of the gender division of labour, where female migrants find that they are fitted into patriarchal stereotypes about women’s roles as carers or sex workers. Ehrenreich and Hochschild observe that care work, domestic work, and sex work in western countries like the UK and America is increasingly fulfilled by women from poor countries. This is a result of several trends: (a) The expansion of service occupations in western countries, which has led to an increasing demand for female labour. (b) Western women have joined the labour force and are less willing or able to perform domestic labour. (c) Western men remain unwilling to perform domestic labour. (d) The failure of the state to provide adequate childcare.
     • The resulting gap has been partially filled by women from poor countries. Shutes found that 40% of adult care nurses in the UK are migrants, and most are female. There’s also a global transfer of women’s emotional labour. For example, migrant nannies provide care and affection for their employers’ children at the expense of their own children, who are often left in the home country. Finally, migrant women also enter the country as ‘mail order’ brides. This often reflects gendered and racialised stereotypes, such as oriental women being subservient. Furthermore, women migrants also enter the UK as illegally trafficked sex workers, often kept in conditions amounting to slavery.

2. Each person will have multiple sources of identity: family, friends, neighbourhood, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and so on. These give us a sense of belonging and identity. For migrants and their descendants, their home country may provide an additional or alternative source of identity. For example, migrants may develop hybrid identities made up of two or more different sources. Eade found that second generation Bangladeshi Muslims in Britain often created hierarchal identities, seeing themselves as Muslim first, then Bengali, then British. Those with hybrid identities may find that others challenge their identity claims or accuse them of not attempting to fit into society.

   • According to Eriksen, globalisation has created more diverse migration patterns. There are many back-and-forth movements of people through networks, rather than permanent settlements in one single country. As a result, migrants are less likely to see themselves as belonging completely to one culture and country. Instead, they develop transnational ‘neither/nor’ identities and loyalties. Modern technology allows us to sustain global ties without having to travel, too. The globalised economy means that migrants may have more links to other migrants around the world than to either their country of origin or settlement. For example, Eriksen describes Chinese migrants in Rome who found Mandarin more useful for everyday life than Italian, simply because Mandarin was more important for their global connections with Chinese in other countries around the world. Therefore, migrants in a globalised world are less likely to feel the need to immerse themselves into the host culture.

3. With increased global flows of migrants, migration has become an important political issue. States now have policies to control immigration, absorb migrants into society, and deal with increased ethnic and cultural diversity. Recently, immigrant policies have also become linked to national security and anti-terrorism policies. Assimilation was the first state policy approach to immigration, aiming to encourage immigrants to adopt the language, values and customs of the host culture. However, assimilation policies face the problem that transnational migrants with hybrid identities may not be willing to abandon their culture or see themselves as belonging to just one nation. Multiculturalism accepts that migrants may wish to retain a separate cultural identity, but this acceptance is often limited to more superficial aspects of cultural diversity.

   • Eriksen distinguishes between ‘shallow diversity’, such as regarding tikka masala as Britain’s national dish, which is acceptable to the state, and ‘deep diversity’, such as arranged marriages or the veiling women, which isn’t acceptable to the state. Similarly, critics argue that multicultural education policies celebrate shallow diversity while failing to address deeper problems, such as racism, children from migrant families suffer from. From about the 1960s there was a move towards multiculturalism, but since the 9/11 Islamist terror attack in 2001, many politicians have swung back towards demanding that migrants assimilate culturally. In France, for example, veiling the face in public became illegal in 2010.
     • However, Castles argues that assimilation policies are counter-productive because they mark out minority groups as culturally backwards and ‘Other’, which can lead to minorities responding by emphasising their differences, as in the case of Islamic fundamentalism. This increases the hosts’ suspicion of them as an ‘enemy within’ and may promote anti-terrorism policies that target them. This creates further segregation, defeating the goal of assimilation. Assimilationist ideas may also encourage UK citizens to blame migrants for social problems such as unemployment, resulting in racist scapegoating. According to Castles and Kosack, this benefits capitalism by creating a racially divided working class and preventing united action in defence of their interests.