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Copyright © Mirna Safi 2020
The right of Mirna Safi to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2210-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2211-8(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Safi, Mirna, author.
Title: Migration and inequality / Mirna Safi.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “In a world of increasingly heated political debates on migration, this book radically shifts the focus to address migration through the lens of inequality. Mirna Safi shows migration to be a mechanism of inequality and shows how studying international migration can challenge current limited, nationally established paradigms of social justice”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019027638 (print) | LCCN 2019027639 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509522101 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781509522118 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509522149 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Emigration and immigration--Social aspects. | Immigrants--Social conditions. | Social justice.
Classification: LCC JV6225 .S235 2020 (print) | LCC JV6225 (ebook) | DDC 304.8--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027638
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027639
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1.1 The foreign-born as a percentage of the total population in OECD countries, 2017
1.2 Major refugee hosting countries in 2015 and 2016
1.3 The share of humanitarian migration in overall permanent migration flows to OECD countries, 2008–17
2.1 Elementary mechanisms of social stratification
3.1 Migration and inequality: the economic channel
4.1 Legal and administrative categorization of migration in OECD countries
4.2 Migration and inequality: the legal channel
5.1 Migration and inequality: the ethnoracial channel
1.1 Perceived and real proportion of the foreign-born population in some OECD countries
2.1 The three channels through which migration affects inequality dynamics
5.1 Migration and ethnoracial boundary dynamics at the national and global levels
This book builds heavily on former research conducted by social science scholars, the overwhelming majority of whom I do not know personally. It also owes much to colleagues I’ve had the tremendous opportunity to meet, work and discuss with. As enriching exchanges with Roger Waldinger encouraged me to put my thinking all together in a book, I feel particularly indebted to him now that the book is ready. I also want to extend my sincere appreciation to Patrick Simon, who supported and improved the first intellectual steps for this book. Collaborations and exchanges with him have been deeply gratifying to me on both personal and professional grounds. Additionally, the consolidation of earlier material owes a lot to formal and informal discussions I’ve had from outstanding colleagues like Yann Algan, Françoise Lorcerie, Andrea Réa, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, and Andreas Wimmer.
I am also indebted to my colleagues and friends at my center, OSC-Sciences Po. Discussions with them have certainly strengthened the book. While I feel grateful to all of them, I want to express my special thanks to Carlo Barone, Philippe Coulangeon, Emanuele Ferragina, Olivier Godechot, Haley McAvey, Ettore Recchi, and Matthew Soener for their comments, suggestions, and encouragements. Bernard Corminboeuf helped me improve the diagrams used for this project and I am profoundly grateful to him. Finally, I’ve been lucky to benefit from Sciences Po and the LIEPP’s financial support.
I feel endlessly grateful to my family, Pierre, Tamim, Mayad, and Liya, for their unconditional love and support.
Most of this book’s thinking began to take shape during a harsh personal period that will make it always be associated with the loss of my father; I would like to dedicate it to him with infinite love and respect.
Despite variability in demographic, political and socioeconomic contexts, immigration has been increasingly depicted as a “social problem” in public debate across Western democracies. Cross-national population movements are most commonly presented as exogenously and illegitimately affecting the economic, political, social, and cultural stability of nation-states. In most societies, immigration is thus incessantly linked to the rise of unemployment, crime, segregation, poverty, and terrorism, and is more generally presented as undermining social cohesion.
These representations generally draw on three distinct “repertoires” that fuel similar narratives about immigration in public discourse despite some variation in their combination across countries: “securitarianism,” humanitarianism and culturalism. Securitarianism denotes the increasing tendency to relate migration to the issue of security of physical borders in the nation-state. This entails the now well-established restrictive turn in immigration policy, with harsher entry rules and increasingly militarized border controls becoming a worldwide model of migration governance. Humanitarianism refers to the inclination to present migrant reception as a “humanitarian act” in wealthy and stable societies that cannot close their eyes to the political, economic, or social injustice usually depicted in the global South. Receiving migrants who seek a better life is therefore a question of generosity, and the political debate is concerned by the degree to which such an aim should and could be fulfilled, as clearly shown by the recent “refugee crisis.” Finally, culturalism pertains to the tendency to perceive immigration as injecting cultural differences in receiving societies (religion, language, norms and values, ways of being, etc.). Whether politically framed as involving cultural “diversity” or cultural “fragmentation,” culturalism draws on the substantive association of immigration with increasing heterogeneity in nation-states originally perceived as ethnically or culturally homogeneous. Although they may bear upon distinctive political and philosophical backgrounds, these three repertoires (securitarianism, humanitarianism, and culturalism) share the common assumption that the nation-state’s perimeter naturally and legitimately limits equal access to political, economic, cultural, and symbolic resources between migrants and non-migrants. Notwithstanding the preconceptions they convey, the public debates surrounding migration are indicative of the degree to which the subject touches central social issues with implications of social justice and the distribution of economic, political, cultural, and symbolic resources.
These repertoires have impacted social science research on migration and fueled its impressive proliferation over the last several decades. Stepping back from immediate policy debates, this book offers a synthesis of this vast literature with a social stratification lens highlighting the specific channels through which migration contributes to the (re)making of inequality. Social inequality is defined in a broad sense: it refers to the fact that some individuals, families, groups, countries (or any other relevant social category) enjoy a disproportionate share of some desired good (income, wealth, rights, respect, etc.). Textbooks on inequality overwhelmingly focus on the triptych class/race/gender. Migration is sporadically tackled through its relation to class and/or race and is rarely treated as a specific component of inequality. This book presents a unified framework relating migration to social inequality. It therefore aims at bridging the gap between three relatively distinct social science fields: migration and immigration studies, ethnic and racial studies, and social stratification and inequality studies. Positioning migration research at the crossroads of these scientific streams fosters our understanding of both migratory dynamics and social inequality mechanisms.
The first chapter maps the terrain of the book. It summarizes contemporary patterns and trends in migration and discusses definition and measurement issues. It also identifies the main areas of inquiry in the field, covering a variety of disciplinary perspectives and theoretical approaches. Chapter 2 moves to the field of stratification and discusses its contemporary developments. Drawing on an analytical framework that summarizes social stratification elementary mechanisms, this chapter attempts to synthetically conceptualize the relation between migration and inequality by identifying three main channels. The next three chapters elaborate on each of these channels. Chapter 3 reviews the literature that has traditionally associated migration with the global division of labor, thus entailing the joint mechanisms of workers’ categorization and redistribution of economic resources. Chapter 4 builds on insights from legal and political scholarship that insist on the way in which migration creates and reshapes inequality through the joint mechanisms of citizenship categorization and redistribution of legal resources. Chapter 5 deals with the symbolic channel through which migration impacts inequality by reconfiguring group boundary dynamics and reshaping ethnoracial classifications. Each chapter starts with an assessment of theories informing the effect of migration on inequality, before moving to the main empirical findings in the corresponding literature. The conclusion discusses current concerns about migration in the light of its conceptualization as a case-study for inequality research.