AFRICAN CONTINENTAL MIGRANTS IN THE CITY
3.7. CONCLUSION
Tully (1999), on ~e other hand, has argued that citizenship is not generated by the possession of rights, justice principles, constitutional safeguards, shared values, norms, or understanding of differences in national of cultural or religious identities, or any process that gives validation to these principles, but by participation of citizens in ways in which their conduct is conditioned by the exercise of power in any system or governance practice. Their conduct in the form of participation involves dialogue, negotiating, and contestation, including having a say, presenting petitions, conducting referenda, meeting and discussing issues, and civil disobedience such as engaging in marches, boycotts, withdrawal of support. It asserts the right to dissent with whoever has power, and over how that power is exercised. It is this participation in the process of who exercises power and how it is exercised that promotes the identity of citizenship. Both Tilly and Tully shift the focus from an exclusive focus on the formal legal and constitutional defmition of citizenship as the possession of rights, to a perspective of how participation in economic and political processes informs the sense of belonging. Agonistic participation, as Tully insists, in whatever form, underlines the sense and identity of citizenship. Such a notion of citizenship does not tie down citizenship to rights alone, nor does it depend on territorially defmed concepts, but rather to practice within a context of governance and holds out the possibility of co-participation in governmental decision making. The image is not one of democratic institutional triumphal ism, but rather of minimal recognition of actors and stakeholders as participants, and acceptance of forms of interaction, including conflict and negotiation. The implications of such perspectives for the debate on migrants and citizenship is explored through the actions, forms of livelihood practices and the sense of belonging that Malawian migrants build up in the city of Durban.
The chapter critically analyses a number of approaches to the question of migrancy. It begins with a critique of structuralist approaches. This includes perspectives on migration inspired by liberal economic orthodox paradigms, as well as radical perspectives based on critical conceptual approaches such as underdevelopment, dependency and uneven development. The common theme for all of these structuralist accounts is that they conceive of migration as a series of steps from a place of origin to a place of destination. When radical approaches do deal with migrants in the city there is a tendency to see them as reflective images playing a role in a linked chain of satellite-metropolitan exploitative relationships. Indeed, the actions and practices of migrants are seen as no more than set pieces in a series of primarily economic exploitative relationships. What migrants actually do to change, challenge, reinforce, or ameliorate their conditions of existence is hardly ever addressed as a central concern, and the whole migration process is conceived as moving from a place of origin to urban settlements, that is, a one-way trip. Neither does it distinguish between different categories of migrants such as nationality, ethnicity, refugee, political asylum seeker, or economic migrant. Nor is there a precise differentiation along lines of class, income, mode of survivals and strategies.
The chapter goes on to argue that a global perspective such as world systems theory has greater potential as a theoretical framework. The central concept of core- periphery in world systems theory is not confmed to the notion that exploitative and dependent relationships exist only as a chain of metropolitan-satellite ties from which surplus is extracted. Originally world systems approaches conceived of migration as a movement from one place to another, and migrants as nothing more than labour units in the service of global capitalism. However, re-conceptualising cores and peripheries as existing simultaneously and in a variety of ways has led to new ways of understanding migration. It becomes possible to think of migration as not confmed to a movement from core to periphery, but as involving the crossing of many cores and peripheries, or just many peripheries. The implication of movement or mobility inherent in such a conception allows for a more differentiated view of migrants, as more than just labour units. Recent theories of migration, such as transnationalism, sought to interrogate and incorporate an explanation of the new patterns and multiple movements of migrants on a world scale. While world systems theory gives a conceptual global structure to these patterns and multiple movements, it also offers a
context for migrants' experiences, desires, identities, and everyday struggles to make a home in the world. 'Making a home' means that migrants have to make sense and structure the place and spaces they occupy as meaningful to them in terms of residence and working for a living. Such processes reveal practices of belonging, exclusion, inclusion and affiliation to specific places in which they settle and associations that migrants form of which they are members, and in which their identities are formed, re-formed and negotiated. The way in which migrants engage and interact in these spheres have implications for citizenship and governance.
In order to explore these issues - the context of migrants' experiential dilemmas and their concrete practices - a number of recent theories of migration are analysed. Each of these theories - social capital, context of reception and transnational approaches were analysed in terms of the particular perspective adopted, and what limitations and positive contributions to they add to the debate on migration. The social capital approach highlights the resources available to migrants from within their network of friends and relatives, including the national or ethnic group they belong to. In chapters five and six this is analysed. While the making of social capital can be instrumentalist in its application, it does highlight the dependence of migrants on a limited network of people, and implicitly the relative success or failure of migrants practices in an urban area. However, social capital in itself abstracted from the broader socio-economic and political context fails to underscore the external environment in which migrants have to operate. The context of reception approach is useful in that it specifies the political and legal dynamics that surround the migrants' lives, and the framework within which migrants have to unpack their social and cultural baggage and the likely impact it may have on the host society. In chapter four this general framework - the rules, regulations and implementation of policies - is reviewed as to its influence on migrants' actions. This is taken further in chapter seven where these actions are related to citizenship
Migrants unpacking their social and cultural baggage is not without its own ambiguities. In some ways resorting to reliance on the social capital of one's own ethnic or national group may be construed as a defence and coping mechanism against the challenges of a new environment defmed by the regulations of a state. Yet while power relations and dominance, particularly that of the state, underline the context of reception approach, they do not preclude migrants from creating their own
ways of seeing the world. The human practices of migrants, that is, the collection of thought, imaginations and actions, daily activities, habits, and representations, can lead to the creation of their own ideology and identification, which may implicitly challenge the hegemony of the state. Such challenges may not necessarily be open and publicly voiced, yet are significant for they elicit responses from the state and local people. It is the transnational approach, which widens the terrain within which migrants operate allowing for an exploration of issues leading directly to questions of citizenship. Firstly, the transnational approach operates on a wider social field. Such an approach transcends nation-state boundaries, without necessarily dismissing them.
For the purposes of this study, this is an important consideration where the state's responses to migrants are not reduced to unsubstantiated notions of a primordial, national or ethnic character. Secondly, other boundaries relating to social, political and cultural spheres become problematised, rather than accepted as such. In short, the contestation of boundaries becomes embedded in a swirl of social, cultural, political, and identity issues that constantly shifts the boundaries of affiliation. Thirdly, this in tum can lead to questions of social differentiation within and between migrant groups, and of issues of inclusion and exclusion, and rights, responsibilities and obligations.
These questions of membership and association raise one of the fundamental issues of this study, that is, of citizenship, because it defmes who belongs and who does not, to organisations, localities and places in the city (and, by extension, to the nation-state as a whole). Before analysing and discussing the empirical da~ I present, in the next chapter, the issue of defining migrants and immigrants, the use of official and unofficial terms to refer to such actors, and the counting procedures to enumerate undocumented migrants. In a review of some of the literature on refugees and migrants, I offer an alternative perspective on what migrants and refugees actually do in the country, and lay the broad framework of regulations that migrants operate in.
This review sets the context of how migrants relate to their own ethnic and national groups, to local people and the state, and the parameters for the substantial discussion of the research data in chapters five, six, and seven.
CHAPTER 4
IMMIGRANTS, MIGRANTS, FOREIGNERS, ALIENS AND ILLEGALS:
COUNTING WHO IS WHO IN SOUTH AFRICA, OR WHO IS DOING WHAT TO SURVIVE.