AFRICAN CONTINENTAL MIGRANTS IN THE CITY
3.1 INTRODUCTION
The popular image of a migrant generally is a transient who comes only to work, whose stay is temporary and will eventually return home. The image of an immigrant is one who presents a permanent break, a physical and emotional rupture with his land or country of origin, and settles permanently in a new country. This distinction also fmds its way into legislation, sometimes as in the case of South Africa, privileging defmitions of immigrant, rather than migrantl. These terms as they are used in public and policy debates in the South African context are analysed in chapter four. Yet often these terms are used interchangeably, and sometimes do not reflect the reality. Migrants are the ones who are supposed to develop networks that extend from their village of towns of origin to their present places of settlement and work, while immigrants have a very loose (if not romanticised) connection to their places of origin. Today this might not be strictly true as immigrants who become permanent residents of another country retain their citizenship, and extend their contact and networks with their countries of origin, and play active roles in both their countries of origin and newly settled countries. Many a migrant may become a permanent resident, perhaps illegally, of the host country. All this suggests that perhaps the conceptions that we have inherited both historically and in the development of social SCIence need revision to describe a new reality in understanding movements of people, immigrants and migrants, who interact across national boundaries in a mUltiplicity of ways, shaped in part by processes of globalisation and their reactions, but also by trying to shape the terms in which their reactions, responses and interactions are situated.
This review will not necessarily be a comprehensive overview, but a selective one which has as its main focus the following: the reasons for migration, what migrants do in the place of destination, including the process of incorporation or assimilation into host society, the emergence of a sense of belonging in their new environment and
~ In ~hapter four I shall review the specific South African literature on this question of defining migrant and lIlliDlgrant.
their continuing links with the place of origin. In the fmal section of the chapter, consideration is given to the literature on migration and citizenship. In order to assess the literature the chapter is divided into different sections: the macro approaches to migration, the meso-level and micro-level approaches. This is done to distinguish between macro- or global level factors that affect migration, and the actual decision making about migration made by individuals, groups, or households and the migratory processes.
3.2 mSTORICAL SKETCH Of EARLY MIGRATION THEORIES
3.2.1 Ravenstein's Laws of Migration
Ravenstein's laws of migration were first published in the last quarter of the 19th century. They were initially based on British, European and United States census data. He identified 11 major laws. These were as follows:
• The majority of migrants only go a short distance.
• Migration proceeds step by step.
• Migrants going long distances generally go by preference to one of the great centres of commerce or industry.
• Each current of migration produces a compensating counter current.
• Females are more migratory than males within the kingdom of their birth, but males more frequently venture beyond.
• Most migrants are adults: families rarely migrate out of their country of birth.
• Large towns grow more by migration than natural increase.
• Migration increases in volume as industries and commerce develop and transport improves.
• The major direction of migration is from the agricultural areas to centres of industry and commerce.
• The major causes of migration are economic.
Excluding the fifth point, Boyle, Halfacree and Robinson (1998: 60) comment that these laws are more or less accurate empirical observations for the 19th century, and many still apply today. However, these laws might today be more accurately employed as hypothesis for empirical investigation. I shall have occasion to comment
on the accuracy of some of Ravenstein' s observations during the course of this thesis.
For now, it should be noted that these observation or laws do not in any great detail explain the economic causes, nor do they explain the impact of migrants on the place of destination except to observe that large towns grow more by migration than natural increase, and that such towns tend to be dominated by industry and commerce. While this links migration flows to distance, population size, and economic opportunities, it will be seen that there is much more to migration than these factors alone.
Nevertheless, Ravenstein's idea of a city's growth, and by implication its importance, as a result of migration is also suggestive of the influence and impact of migrants beyond simply as a quantifiable size of migrant labour units.
3.2.2 Migration: Pre-colonial, Colonial and Post-colonial
Underlining Ravenstein' s laws of migration is a view that migration is a unilinear movement of people from one place to another, as in various people of European origin migrating to America. However, as Coquery-Vidrovitch suggests, one needs to be wary of imposing a Eurocentric conception of migration as in Africa mobility and long distance trade are 'two major phenomena' on the African continent, particularly in the pre-colonial period (1977: 79). These movements of people in Africa come to an end with colonial expansion and consolidation of the colonial state's boundaries.
But whether the conceptions of these migrations and movements or trade are unilinear, or expansionist waves within and between regions or different parts of the African continent or the planet, in pre- or post-colonial periods, it is necessary to distinguish between the voluntary element in the movement of people and those that emanate from forced migration. Voluntary migration could be explained by orthodox economic explanations that labour and traders moved to where there was the possibility of jobs, a livelihood through trading opportunities and a new beginning.
This theory could, for example, explain the movement of people from Europe to the colonies, particularly settler colonies such as America, South Africa, Kenya, Australia and New Zealand among others. It could possibly explain migrating Arab traders and Swahili settlements on the east coast of Africa, and trade with Asia, predating the Portuguese by a several centuries. Nevertheless, this migration as expansionist, colonial and voluntary must be distinguished from involuntary migration as a result of colonial conquest.
Migration in these colonies is exhibited as internal forced or controlled migration (Freund, 1988: 14-18, Lacey, 1981; Zegeye and Ishemo, 1989). The classic case of internal forced migration is the apartheid state, but elements of forced labour and migration appeared in different parts of Africa (Zegeye and Ishemo, 1989). One of the most sustained debates over the effects and impacts of migration, positive and negative, both on rural and urban populations can be seen in a series of case studies by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in the 1930s and 1940s in Zambia. I shall have occasion later to analyse and comment on these studies as it applies to the central concerns of this thesis. Another central focus on forced or controlled migration has been South Africa. Until about the late 1980s migrants and migration was very much the focus of sustained empirical research beginning with the assumptions set out in series of seminal articles by Legassick (1974), Wolpe (1972), and among others (e.g.
Johnstone, 1970, 1976, Jeeves, 1975). The theoretical framework of the new revisionist approach in Southern African studies dominated studies of migration in the 1970s and 1980s. The central thesis of these writers was that controlled, or forced, migration led to lower wages and hence super-exploitation of workers, and was key to understanding capitalist development and the entire edifice of segregation and apartheid, including the development of major cities such as Johannesburg, and Durban. (Swanson, 1964; Smith, 1992)
The continued existence of migration patterns, albeit changing in the 1990s, seemed to receive considerably less independent academic attention. One needs to note here the studies of foreign migration by Lewis in relation to trade and skills development (n.d. Chapter 9 "Labour Migration" of the Commission to Investigate the Development of a Comprehensive Labour Market Policy), Cross on internal migration in Durban (n.d. The City as a Destination), and Gelderblom on how rural- urban migration reinforces inequalities (2000). Indeed today, the public debate is less about migration per se, but about infra-structural development, housing and service provision. When migration is considered, it is framed in the context of illegal immigrants, refugees, street children, squatters and crime as social problems rather than the continued structural existence of migration patterns, both internally within the country and more recently of international migrants coming to the country.
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Migration has changed from those early waves of migration from the old world to the new world, from the metropolitan countries to the colonies, and within the colonies.
Today, with globalisation, there are whole new kinds of migration taking place, which require new kinds of research with different theoretical explanations of these new migratory patterns. Principally people move, not just from point A to point B, but also circulate and crossing many different kinds of boundaries. Such boundaries would include physical boundaries, border posts, cultural and political boundaries.
This is not to suggest that such kinds or types of migratory patterns did not occur in the past, except that the volume of such migration today is probably more intense, but also uncertain by comparison with the past. Furthermore, the incorporation of these new migrants into the host society by the state is not uncontested and without social and political implications. The attempt by the state to control migration, especially illegal migration, is not just contested, but often has the unqualified and uncritical support of the host population on grounds of protecting employment, lack of resources and xenophobia.
The main focus of the chapter will be to review some of the theoretical approaches to migration, which developed some of the insights of Ravenstein that placed an emphasis on the mobility of migrants and their underlining economic causes. These macro level structural theories initially were drawn from neo-classical economics (Boyle, Halfacree, and Vaughan, 1998: 61) that attached importance to employees responding to wage differentials. Structuralist approaches influenced by Marxism, are critical of neo-classical theories of migration. Structural Marxism sought to explain the larger political and economic context within which various classes of people, particularly workers, or segments of the working class, and peasants predisposed to move either because they are forced, for example as indentured labourers, refugees or asylum seekers, or because they have to follow the contours of capitalist investment trajectories to fmd and secure employment.
More recent explanations of migration based on what Grosfoguel and Cordoso- Guzman (1999) call the new sociology of international migration consider a number of approaches, namely (1) assimilationist, (2) pluralist, (3) the context of reception, (4) the social capital and (5) transnational approaches. These approaches will be outlined below with a view to consider the reasons for moving that are suggested
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within their particular perspective, and what, in turn, it suggests migrants do when they arrive in their destinations and begin to unpack their experiences and skills to cope with the new social, economic and political environment they have to confront and interact with in order to survive. A central feature of these new approaches is not necessarily to eschew older structural approaches, but to build on those insights with new methodologies such as biographical perspectives and insights derived from a body of post-modernist and post-colonial writing. Although many of the fmer points of these theories draw from and are applicable to the United States and Europe, there are elements of these theories that may be considered useful to explore in the unfolding debate on migration in South Africa. More specifically, the debates about incoming migrants, undocumented and documented, illegal and legal migrants, immigrants, refugees and political asylum seekers from a host of countries beyond the immediate borders of South Africa needs to be broadened to focus more precisely on what do these migrants do when they arrive, and what implications does this have for both the migrants as bearers of human rights and citizens. The converse of this is what implications do these practices of migrants have for the host society specifically state policies.
At an empirical level of individuals it is relatively simple to point to the reasons why people migrate - the desire to escape oppression, famine, or civil war, to seek new opportunities for wealth, education of children, family reunification, earning additional income for rural households, and so on. One can compile a list of push and pull factors and assign the appropriate percentages to each category of reasons.
However, this does not explain patterns of movement such as return or circulatory migratory patterns, or the association of certain socio-economic or cultural/ethnic characteristics, which inform the particular identities that migrants have and use. Nor does it explain the emergence of associations, social networks and differentiated ways of incorporation or exclusion into the mainstream of the host society: in short the structural factors that explain a pattern of movement, or the diversity of movements over time. Furthermore, and what is central to this work, is the convergence of economic and political constraints with the strategies that migrants create to deal with and overcome them. Such issues need to be explained in structural and experiential terms, or what Wright (1995: 171) calls, drawing from the work of Giddens, 'the mutual dependency, rather than opposition, of human agency and social structure'. In
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addition to such explanations, the implications of the experiences of migration and practices in the specific context and for larger societal issues such as citizenship and identity need to be explored.