AFRICAN CONTINENTAL MIGRANTS IN THE CITY
3.5 MICRO-LEVEL PERSPECTIVES: BETWEEN STRUCTURE AND DECISION MAKING
Many of the studies that shed light on the processes of insertion, belonging, survival strategies, and exclusion still contain the limitation that all migration is about movement from one point (origin) to a point of destination. For example, the original assumptions of world systems theory tends to reduce migration to labour migration and immigrants to workers, thus playing down any discussion and theoretical reflections on racial, ethnic or national identities which shape their consciousness, actions and habitual practices. The classical liberal approach shares similar
,\1
assumptions, but argues that such identities become erased or reduced as migrants and immigrants become incorporated into the mainstream of the host society. They become assimilated over time. To all intents and purposes migrants become facsimiles of the host population: they lose their origin identities. A variant of this approach argues that ethnic identity is not necessarily erased, but modified. This variant has been called the culturalist pluralist approach. What is of interest is the creation and use of ethnic identities among immigrant and migrant groups for securing livelihoods and upward mobility.
3.5.1 Migration and Identities
The culturalist pluralist approach argues that while migrant ethnic groups lose their language and customs, their ethnic identity continues in a new form in a new context.
In the American context it becomes a hyphenated identity: Irish-Americans, African- Americans, Jewish-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, etc. It is suggested that these ethnic identities serve other functions such becoming internally organised for economic support and upward mobility, and acting as lobby and pressure groups within the wider political system at both a national and local level.
They are able to engage in such activity because they have legal citizen status. This approach argues that ethnic identity is grounded in the internal workings - the micro- networks - of a bounded ethnic community that establishes the social capital for overcoming the adversity of being poor immigrants or, perversely, constraining access to resources. Ultimately such ethnic identities are conceived as positive assets assisting in the assimilation of migrants/immigrants as citizens into the dominant values of the host society. For the purposes of this thesis, there are two important opposing perspectives to consider which inhibit the progress of ethnic immigrant and migrant groups. The first is that it might be argued that cultural practices of ethnic groups that constrain access to resources or limit assimilation constitutes a socially constructed 'culture of poverty' (Grosfoguel and Cordero-Guzman, 1998: 353-54).
This means that certain ethnic groups pull back their members from taking advantage of opportunities to advance beyond their current status, and hence all members of the ethnic group have relatively the same standard of living. While not denying the existence of such a sociological levelling phenomenon, labelling the effect 'culture of poverty' is, in effect, to blame the 'victim' for their own lack of assimilation, success and open acceptance of the values and norms of the host society. It suggests that the host society, in particular the state as the agency of rules and regulations regarding
migrants, is benign. The second perspective is that the micro-networks and internal dynamics of ethnic communities cannot be fully understood without linking them to meso- and macro-level mediating structures and social relationships that shape the labour market for incorporating such ethnic groups (Grosfoguel and Cordero- Guzman, 1998: 355). For example, racial discrimination or xenophobia, which may not be legally sanctioned; can act as mechanisms of exclusion from incorporation into the society, and perpetuates migrants' marginal status. In countries that do not legally or constitutionally endorse racial, ethnic or religious discrimination, such barriers to incorporation induces a focus on other reasons that inhibit migrants' participation in the mainstream. In the next sub-section I examine this proposition, and question the state's response to immigration and migration as benign.
3.5.2 The Context of Reception Approach
Thus far this exposition has focussed on the migrants themselves. One crucial aspect of migration is the actions and policies of the state, particularly their regimes of incorporation of migrants and immigrants (Soysal, 1994, 29-40, Freeman, 2003).
Grosfoguel and Cordero-Guzman (1998: 357-58) broaden the discourse on policy and institutional aspects of migration to include:
• Reactions and to and perceptions of immigrants by public opinion; and
• Presence or absence of an established ethnic community to receive immigrants.
This approach, called the context of reception approach, provides the framework within which a diverse set of modes of incorporation of immigrants takes place, especially within the labour market. Such a state policy also rests on a unilinear conception of migration. It assumes a point of departure and a point of arrival, and designs policy to accommodate, control or reverse such trends.
For international migrants, reception refers to the formal aspects such as the official process of documenting the arrival and reason for migrants entering the country _ whether people are refugees, asylum seekers, work seekers, students, researchers, and business people. Reception also refers to the state policies of incorporating migrants into the host society, such as providing information on how to fmd accommodation and work, or in the case of refugees and political asylum seekers, initial assistance with accommodation, work, or the means to fmd work, language services (if there are language barriers) and social and welfare services. State reception policies and
actions may also refer to implementation, or simply the lack of provision of any services at all beyond the documentation of migrants. Reaction to and perceptions of migrants by the public can take their cue from government policies and actions.
While a government may have humane policies regarding migrants, their actual implementation, or lack of proper implementation, may be the result of the dialectic of local citizens' perceptions and pressure to limit foreign incoming migrants, and government action, or more likely inaction, to carry out their policy commitments.
Thus, for example, official commitment to treat refugees with compassion and dignity may well be undermined by actions, official, unofficial, formal or informal, which treat foreigners as less than welcome, thus inciting and exacerbating xenophobic attitudes and condoning ill-treatment of foreign migrants by the state's population.
The comparison and analyses of state policies on immigration and migration is useful in understanding the way the state receives migrants, how their responsibilities are meet, or how they absolve themselves from such responsibilities (Kobayashi, n.d: 9;
Freeman, 2003: 6-8). In the case where the state absolves or delegates, or deflects its responsibilities, there usually already exists a substantial ethnic or national groups which takes responsibility for assisting newly arrived migrants. The ethnic community becomes the conveyor belt of reception. Indeed part of the reception and incorporation of migrants into the urban centres is to introduce them to the network of people from the same ethnic group or sympathisers who will assist and advise on a range of issues, principally on matters of accommodation and making a living. In this sense they carry out the responsibilities of the state in terms of the initial provision of welfare services, accommodation and perhaps employment as well. At this point the context of reception approach begins to appear more like the social capital approach.
However, as Grosfoguel and Cordero-Guzman (1998: 358) have pointed out, the state's interest in receiving migrants may be biased in favour of some groups over others for economic and/or geo-political reasons. Such an instrumental view or policy is often silent on complex circulatory dynamics, including global patterns of migration. Such circulatory and global patterns of migrations cannot easily be reduced to simple push-pull economic or instrumental factors. The way the state responds to such issues also raises questions about its policy on migration, immigration and citizenship. The question of citizenship as a concept is introduced later in this chapter. The issue of the link between citizenship and migration as a theoretical and policy issue is analysed in chapters four, seven and eight.
3.5.3 Biographical Approaches to Migration
While there is a need to understand state policies and their implementation and their articulation with new complex patterns of migration, there is also a need to understand how migrants react, anticipate, circumvent, or indeed use state policy to their advantage. Such a perspective which recognises the limitations and constraints on migrants but which incorporates individual responses to overcome the constraints, or to engage with those structural limitations has been termed biographical approaches (Boyle, Halfacree, and Robinson, 1998: 80). Methodologically the focus is on the biography of individual migrant's story - its narrative structure - drawn from in-depth interviews. There are three important elements of the biographical approach. Firstly, migration is seen as action in time, in that the decision to migrate is not about the instant that the decision made, but about the build up to that moment, which involves both the migrants' past and anticipated future. Secondly, the specific migrations involve multiple reasons and causes for moving, and thirdly, it is embedded within the individual's wider social, economic and cultural relationships (Boyle, Halfacree, and Robinson, 1998: 80-81).
The biographical approach is not antithetical to a transnational approach as outlined by Basch et. al. It allows for identifying those critical variables in the transnational approach, namely
~ Crossing of boundaries and regions
~ Establishing and maintaining social relationships across national boundaries
~ Developing networks
~ Engaging in activities/practices with people who span the generations and spatial divide
~ Developing multiple identities and ideologies
~ Investing in particular patterns of living - accommodation, work leisure activities
A focus on these variables suggests the following. Firstly, a primary element of transmigration is the multiple relationships between place of origin and place of settlement involving a network of family, friends and business associates through which remittances; information, capital and commodities are passed. It implies communication to be more than merely personal contact, but also supporting business initiatives, or building homes, acquiring land, being consulted on the use of
remittances, and other resources. Secondly, there is the issue of boundaries. While it is fairly clear when migrants cross international or nation-state boundaries, there are other boundaries to consider. The transnational experience consists of much more than a simple crossing of legal-political boundary. Once people have made those legal national state crossings, a diverse set of experiences of incorporation bring with them a diverse set of practices informed by different ideological and cultural experiences, commodity exchange, remittances, and movement back and forth from places of origin and destination. Hence it would be misleading to emphasise cultural assimilation as the main means of incorporation into a host society, as it would be to emphasize economic or capitalist intentions as the primary push or pull factors for migration. Migrants bring with them a diverse set of practices, but all these take place within a set of structural conditions in the context of core-periphery relations. The analytical value of recognising transnational migration, and within that biographical approaches, is that it enables distinctions to be made among patterns of migration within and between nation-state boundaries, and more to the point, migrants' experiences as socially constructed and situated in particular political-economic and sociocultural contexts.
There are two critical aspects of these contexts that are implicit in much of the concepts and theoretical positions reviewed here. The fIrst is that the actions of individual migrants, the networks that they belong to, and the locality or localities in which they operate become a set of well established and accepted set of practices. In undertaking the activities they do, to make a living for example, it leads them to become incorporated as part of the broader social structure. The second point is that as a result of their actions, migrants develop a sense of belonging to a particular locality through their participation in its economic and social life. Belonging, even as a transnational migrant, imagines a place as part of their sense of being there.
Belonging within a locality, here defmed as the place of destination, implicitly raises the question of citizenship as the right to participate and contribute to its social and economic life. It is to this question that I now briefly turn to introduction the link between citizenship and migration. I shall in chapter seven give an extended discussion on citizenship as it relates to Malawian migrants in Durban.