Achieving the sustainable development goals: surfacing the role for a gender analytic of migration

ABSTRACT

This paper forms the introduction to the Special Issue: Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through the Gender, Migration and Development Nexus. This article takes a broad look at the changing dynamics of migration and development through the feminisation of globalised labour flows and the gendered experiences of categorisation by states and multilateral bodies, and the gender-specific vulnerabilities and outcomes of human mobility. We illustrate how a more nuanced approach to the SDGs that incorporates gender and migration is needed in order that policy and programming designed to achieve the 2030 Agenda is accurately informed and appropriately framed. In this paper and this Issue, we argue, that it is necessary to confront the SDGs with a deeper understanding of gender, migration and development in order to illuminate the interconnected globalised and transnational realities of gendered labour flows. With this aim in mind, we look to civil society participation and the role of the existing human rights architecture, as the key to ensuring that a deep, wholistic and ultimately universal application of the SDGs can be achieved addressing those populations whose rights to development have been undermined by dint of their migration or flight and applying a gender analysis to our understanding of migration and development.     

‘No more Turkish music!’ The acculturation strategies of teachers and ethnic minority students in Flemish schools

ABSTRACT

While considerable research has focused on the process and factors affecting acculturation, there is little research that investigates how members of minority and majority groups define acculturation in educational settings. Ethnographic research and qualitative interviews in three secondary schools in Flanders (Belgium) show that teachers and ethnic minority students have different ideas and expectancies regarding the concept ‘integration’, which appears to affect student–teacher relationship. Berry et al.’s [1989. “Acculturation Attitudes in Plural Societies.” Applied Psychology: An International Review 3 (2): 185-206. doi:10.1111/j.1464-0597.1989.tb01208.x.] acculturation orientations are used as a theoretical template to analyse teachers’ and ethnic minority students’ discourses about acculturation. Analyses reveal that students of immigrant descent perceive acculturation mainly in terms of the establishment of intergroup contact. In contrast, teachers find it harder to disconnect cultural maintenance from contact and participation. By suggesting some form of cultural adoption, teachers hope to socialise their ethnic minority students into the culture of the dominant ethnic group and prepare them for their future. These distinct interpretations of ‘integration’ in everyday life (which actually refers to acculturation) often leads to misunderstandings between ethnic minority students and their teachers, even to conflict, as many students feel that their cultural background is disparaged and not fully valued in school.     

试论明代青海河湟地区人口迁移

本文着重论述了明代河湟地区的移民活动状况,描述了人口迁移活动的历史过程,较详细考证了移民的来源、迁入区以及移民的方式等相关问题。在一定程度上填补了青海移民史的空白,对全面了解明代河湟地区的社会活动有着重要的意义。     

Foreign policy priorities and ethnic return migration policies: group-level variation in Greece and Serbia

ABSTRACT

Why do ethnoculturally defined states pursue favourable policies to integrate some returnees from their historical diasporas while neglecting or excluding others? We study this question by looking at members of two historical diasporas that, in the 1990s, returned to their respective ethnic homelands, Greece and Serbia, but were not treated uniformly by their respective governments. Utilising a wide range of primary sources, we consider evidence for a number of plausible explanations for such policy variation, including the economic profile of an ethnic returnee group, its status in internal ethnic hierarchies, its lobbying power, and dynamics of party politics. We find, instead, that the observed variation is best explained by the role that each particular group played in the ruling elites’ ex ante foreign policy objectives. Elites discouraged the repatriation of co-ethnics from parts of the world they still had claims over, by pursuing unfavourable repatriation policies. Conversely, absent a revisionist claim, states adopted favourable repatriation policies to encourage their repatriation and facilitate their integration upon return. Methodologically, the article illustrates the importance of focused comparisons across dyads of states and particular sub-diaspora groups.     

Who gets ‘Left behind’? Promises and pitfalls in making the global development agenda work for sex workers – reflections from Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) do, at least on a rhetorical level, tie countries and other development actors to a rights-based vision of development, which expressly includes labour rights, migrant rights and women’s rights. Despite this, sex workers continue to migrate and work in the margins where rights are difficult to claim. In looking for sex work in the SDGs, we ask how the SDGs respond to the rights of sex workers and whether more needs to be read into the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development so that states are able to keep the new promise that no one be ‘left behind’? In investigating this issue, we draw upon research conducted in the Southeast Asian region and in Cambodia in particular. In analysing the commitment that development should be inclusive in ways that ‘leave no one behind’, we raise concerns about the target-driven nature of the SDG development agenda that may well prove incapable of mediating the heated debates over the understandings of sex work that play out at both the international and the local level.     

The politics of evidence-based policy in Europe’s ‘migration crisis’

ABSTRACT

Increased migration across the Mediterranean to Europe during 2015 was associated with growing interest in generating new research evidence to assist policymakers in understanding the complexities of migration and improve policy responses. In the UK, this was reflected in funding by the Economic and Social Research Council for a Mediterranean Migration Research Programme. Drawing on evidence from the programme, this volume explores the nature of Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ and the extent to which the development of new migration management policies was grounded in evidence about the causes, drivers and consequences of migration to Europe. The authors conclude that there is a substantial ‘gap’ between the now significant body of evidence examining migration processes and European Union policy responses. This gap is attributed to three main factors: the long-standing ‘paradigm war’ in social research between positivist, interpretivist and critical approaches which means that what counts as ‘evidence’ is contested; competing knowledge claims associated with research and other forms of evidence used to construct and/or support policy narratives; and, perhaps most importantly, the politics of policymaking, which has resulted in policies based on underlying assumptions and vested interests rather than research evidence, even where this evidence is funded directly by European governments.     

Transnational migration and the involuntary return of undocumented migrants across the Cambodian–Thai border

ABSTRACT

Migration from Cambodia is a major livelihood strategy for rural communities, with most rural families having at least one, usually younger, member migrating in search of work. The pervasive nature of this phenomenon relates to Cambodia’s troubled political past, and the country’s political economy that structures choice and opportunity. Under-investment in the agrarian economy together with unequal access to credit and productive resources leaves many rural Cambodians with little option but to migrate to boost family income. Thailand is the number one destination for rural Cambodians. Most have an undocumented status, putting them at risk of arrest and deportation. The return of more than 200,000 migrants to Cambodia over a two-week period in 2014 was precipitated by the Thai military’s seizure of power and migrants’ fear of the consequences of political instability, given their still vivid historical memory of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror during the 1970s. Interviews with Cambodian migrants and members of their families are examined within a wider political and economic context to gain insight into migrants’ motivations and decision-making. The expulsion of migrants from Thailand casts light on the compulsive nature of migration, despite the high risks and precarious conditions under which undocumented migration takes place.     

In and out from the European margins: reshuffling mobilities and legal statuses of Romani minorities between the Post-Yugoslav space and the European Union

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the mobilities of Romani minorities between the ‘old’ EU Member States and the non-EU Post-Yugoslav space. It unravels how the mobilities of Romani individuals, who are Non-EU Post-Yugoslav citizens, were different from the mobilities of Roma coming from other post-socialist spaces, now EU Member States. Instead of focusing on motivations for mobility of Romani individuals as some previous work has done, this paper investigates the treatment of these mobilities by different states and the legal statuses these states ascribe to those labelled as Romani migrants. By using the combination historical and socio-legal analysis, this paper diachronically examines the precarious migrant statuses of Post-Yugoslav Romani minorities in the old EU, such as Yugoslav labour migrants, Post-Yugoslav forced migrants and subsequently the ‘bogus’ asylum seekers. The paper points to the interconnectedness of these statuses, but also to their interminable liminality: they are constantly on the verge of being rendered ‘illegal’ and are hence subject to deportability. I claim that while their legal statuses are being reshuffled, their liminality and interconnectedness also contribute to circular mobilities between the Post-Yugoslav space and the EU. I investigate how these mobilities are not only socially produced, but are also legally and politically conditioned by the hierarchical relationship between the Post-Yugoslav space and the EU. As a side effect of this relationship, Roma are positioned as a racialized minority, treated only as temporary migrants in their ‘host country’ and without prospects of inclusion in their ‘country of origin’ as minority citizens.     

On the threshold: becoming Romanian Roma,everyday racism and residency rights in transition

ABSTRACT

This article examines the reaction of welfare state actors and ‘Romanian Roma’ migrants to the political environment on migration in the UK. Based on the ethnographic fieldwork between January 2013 and March 2014, the article focuses on how processes of everyday racism infused understandings of the legal framework for European migrants’ residency rights. The article first explores how state actors developed ideas about ‘Romanian Roma families’ as opposed to ‘Romanian-not-Roma families’ in a context marked by pervasive uncertainty about legal entitlements, welfare restructuring and decreasing resources. Second, I draw on new migrants’ accounts to identify their perceptions and understandings of discrimination placed within their previous experiences of racism and state violence. The article argues that processes of racialisation are subtly enfolded into everyday life shaping the narratives through which both welfare state actors and new migrants understand their situated experiences and future plans. The article reveals the small and mundane practices that reproduce racialised hierarchies which maintain the notion of ‘Roma’ as a group with particular proclivities and the affects for their socio-legal status as European migrants in the UK.     

Back to the future: religious mobility among Danish Pakistani Sufi Muslims

ABSTRACT

Pakistani migrant families in Denmark are embedded in a transnational social field, one that stretches between the rural villages in Punjab that they left behind in the 1960s and 1970s, and their new home in greater Copenhagen. However, the upcoming generation, born and raised in Denmark, often has an ambivalent relationship with the homeland of their parents. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Sufi tariqa(order, path) called Naqshbandi Mujaddidi Saifi, this article explores how the ritual of ‘zikr Allah’ (the commemoration of God) provides an opportunity for the Copenhagen Saifis to cultivate new connections with Pakistan, beyond the kinship networks and the family village of origin. The ritual is significant for their aspiration to become pious Muslims. In this process, Pakistan comes to be ascribed with new meanings. Whereas the parents’ generation associated Pakistan with family and kin, property, houses, and power connected to the village of origin, these pious Saifis begin to associate Pakistan with spirituality, purity, and love for their shaykh in particular and the Sufi tariqa in general.