The Transnationalized Social Question

The Transnationalized Social Question

Migration and the Politics of Social Inequalities in the
Twenty-First Century

Thomas Faist
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Acknowledgements

Many colleagues have inspired the thoughts presented and advanced in this book. I am grateful to all
of them, especially Peter Kivisto who read the manuscript and provided thoughtful comments. I also
benefited from invitations extended by, among others, Maurizio Ambrosini, Raúl Delgado Wise, Luis
Guarnizo, Ahmet Içduygu, Danièle Joly, Riva Kastoryano, Akihiro Koido, Peggy Levitt, Alessandro
Monsutti, Nina Nyborg-Sørensen, Erik Olsson, Waldemar Skrobacki, Cathérine Wihtol de Wenden,
and Elke Winter. Their workshops and colloquia all provided venues for stimulating exchange. I also
had the privilege of informally discussing various aspects of issues related to the transnationalized
social question with Oliver Bakewell, Simone Castellani, Jorge Durand, Marisol Garcia, Nina Glick
Schiller, Jörg Hüttermann, Branka Likić Brborić, Tao Liu, Alejandro Portes, Jeanette Schade, Inka
Stock, Levent Tezcan, Christian Ulbricht, and Nick van Hear. Conversations with these colleagues
stimulated my thoughts on migration and inequalities. Thanks also go to the research team of the
project ‘Informal Social Protection and Social Inequalities’ funded by the German Research Council
(DFG) from 2011 to 2015—among them Anna Amelina, Karolina Barglowski, Başak Bilecen, and
Joanna Sienkiewicz. Some aspects of that project are presented in Chapter 6 of this book on social
protection in families and friendship networks. As to the analysis on environmental destruction and
migration I draw on work within the European Social Science (ESF) Research Conference series on
Climate Change and International Migration (2010–12), which was also supported by Bielefeld
University and its Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF). Throughout, Edith Klein has provided
thorough editorial support for various versions of this text and has helped to render the ideas
expressed more clearly and the prose much more legibly; Brian North’s copy editing, Rebecca
Bryant’s proofreading, and Palani Santhosh’s project management also proved very helpful. At
Oxford University Press, Olivia Wells attentively guided me along the way toward publication. I
sincerely apologize if I have not mentioned other colleagues here from whose critical feedback I
benefited.
Some material has been published previously and is included with permission: parts of Chapter 3
on the migration–inequalities nexus appeared in a preliminary version in the Annual Review of
Sociology (2016);1 some basic thoughts on transnational social rights explored in Chapters 2 and 4
appeared in an article in International Sociology (2009);2 and the main ideas on migration and social
protection in the European Union in Chapter 5 were published in the Journal of European Social
Policy (2014) and in Oxford Development Studies (2016).3 The empirical studies on the social
protection web of migrants from Poland, Turkey, and Kazakhstan presented in Chapter 6 are drawn in
part from the conclusion of a special issue on social protection in small groups in Population, Space
and Place (2015).4 Ideas on the moral polity of migration control and externalization in Chapter 7 are
drawn from a symposium contribution in Ethnic and Racial Studies, and thoughts on the migration–
development nexus appeared in Population, Space and Place (2008).5 The various stages of the
climate change and migration nexus were first explored in a contribution to the Journal of
Intercultural Studies.6 Basic thoughts on the public role of social scientists in Chapter 11 were
applied to the migration–development nexus in an article for New Diversities (2014).7 For the
purposes of this volume the ideas from these earlier publications have been significantly revised,
expanded, and embedded in a broader argument.

Notes
1. ‘Cross-Border Migration and Social Inequalities’. Annual Review of Sociology 42 (2016): pp. 323–46. Annual Reviews, Inc.
2. ‘The Transnational Social Question: Social Rights and Citizenship in a Global Context’. International Sociology 24(1) (2009): pp. 7–
35. SAGE Publications Ltd.
3. ‘On the Transnational Social Question in Europe: How Inequalities are Reproduced in Europe’. Journal of European Social Policy
24(3) (2014): pp. 207–22. SAGE Publications Ltd.; ‘Transnational Social Protection in Europe: A Social Inequality Perspective’.
Oxford Development Studies 45(1) (2017): pp. 1–13. Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com.
4. ‘Social Inequalities through the Lens of Social Protection: Notes on the Transnational Social Question’. Population, Space and
Place 21 (2015): pp. 282–93. Co-authored with Başak Bilecen. John Wiley & Sons.
5. ‘The Moral Polity of Forced Migration’. Ethnic and Racial Studies 41(3) (2018): pp. 412–23. Taylor & Francis Ltd,
http://www.tandfonline.com; ‘Migrants as Transnational Development Agents: An Inquiry into the Newest Round of the Migration–
Development Nexus’. Population, Space and Place 14(1) (2008): pp. 21–42. John Wiley & Sons.
6. ‘The Socio-Natural Question: How Climate Change Adds to Social Inequalities’. Journal of Intercultural Studies 39(2) (2018): pp.
195–206. Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com.
7. ‘The Public Role of Social Scientists in Constituting the Migration–Development Nexus’. New Diversities 16(2) (2014): pp. 112–23.
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
Contents

List of Figure & Tables

List of Abbreviations

1. Introduction: Migration as the Transnationalized Social Question

Part I. Approaching the Transnationalized Social Question

2. The Social Question Then and Now: From Voice to Exit?
3. The Nexus of Cross-Border Migration and Social Inequalities

Part II. Inequalities in Social Protection

4. Social Rights and Social Standards in Cross-Border Migration
5. Migration, Social Protection, and the (Re)Production of Inequalities in the European Union
6. Social Protection among Small Groups in European Transnational Social Spaces

Part III. The Transnational Puzzle: Politics around the Social Question
7. Externalization in Cross-Border Migration
8. Immigration: Internalizing the Social Question
9. Emigration: Development and Diaspora in Global Nations

Part IV. Future Directions

10. The Socio-Natural Question: The Future is the Present
11. No Alternative? The Public Role of Social Scientists in Understanding the Transnationalized
Social Question

Bibliography
Index
List of Figure & Tables

Figure
4.1 Formalization and scales in cross-border social protection

Tables
4.1 The four segments of social protection (in percentages)
6.1 Operationalization of family-based social protection
8.1 Two major tensions: the welfare and the liberal paradox
8.2 Actors in immigration policy
8.3 The social question: wanted and/or welcome
9.1 General social processes in emigration contexts
9.2 Wanted and/or welcome (again)
List of Abbreviations

ACP African, Caribbean, and Pacific

BRICS Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa
CEE Central and Eastern Europe
CEO chief executive officer
DIK Deutsche Islam Konferenz
ENSO El Niño Southern Oscillation
EU European Union
EVS European Values Study
FRG Federal Republic of Germany
GAMM Global Approach to Migration and Mobility
GCIM Global Commission on International Migration
GDP gross domestic product
GFMD Global Forum on Migration and Development
GIZ German Society for International Cooperation
HTAs Hometown Associations
ICMPD European Commission and the International Centre for MigrationPolicy Development
IDPs internally displaced persons
ILO International Labour Organization
IMF International Monetary Fund
INGO international non-governmental organization
IOM International Organization for Migration
IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
MCP Multiculturalism Policy Index
NELM New Economics of Labour Migration
NGO non-governmental organization
NIC newly industrialized country
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
PMB Persons with a Migration Background
PoA Programme of Action
POEA Philippine Overseas Employment Administration
SDG Sustainable Development Goals
UN United Nations
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNHCR Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
WCSDG World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization
WHO World Health Organization
WTO World Trade Organization
1

Introduction
Migration as the Transnationalized Social Question

The social question is back. Yet today’s social question is not primarily between labour and capital,
as it was in the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth. In earlier periods class
differences dominated conflicts. While class has always been criss-crossed by manifold
heterogeneities, not least of all cultural ones around ethnicity, religion, and language, it is these latter
heterogeneities that have sharpened in situations of immigration and emigration over the past decades.
The contemporary social question is located at the interstices between the global South and the global
North. It finds its expression in movements of people seeking a better life or fleeing unsustainable
social, political, economic, and ecological conditions. It is transnationalized not only because
migrants and their significant others entertain ties across the borders of national states, staying in
touch with family and friends, or receiving or sending financial remittances in transnational social
spaces. Also of importance are the cross-border recruitment schemes for workers and the cross-
border diffusion of norms appealed to in the case of migration—for example, the social right to
decent work as a human right. Moreover, migration can become an issue of inclusion or exclusion in
fields important to life chances, such as education, work, social protection, and housing, in the
emigration, transit, or immigration states—a sort of transnationalization of national states. And, as in
the nineteenth century, political conflicts arise, constituting the social question as a public concern.
Economic and political inequalities characterize the modern world. In observing the changing
pattern of global income distribution—by no means the only indicator of unequal life chances but an
important one—one may even surmise that cross-border migration has played an ever more important
role in addressing social inequalities because of the increasing significance of location and
membership for life chances of individuals and groups. According to this perspective, unlike
conditions in the mid-nineteenth century, when income inequality could be explained by class
understood as the ownership of the means of production, the situation at the start of the twenty-first
century is different. While in the late nineteenth century, around 1870, about 50 per cent of income
differences could be attributed to whether or not people owned the means of production, and about 20
per cent to location, that is, the country in which one was living, this relationship has almost reversed.
In 2000, more than two-thirds of global income differences could be attributed to huge gaps in
average income between countries, whereas the share attributed to class has declined considerably, to
around a quarter (Milanovic 2012: 205). In other words, if we were to construct a global map of
income inequality, showing where each household or individual stood vis-à-vis everyone else in the
world (that is, combining information on within- and between-country inequality), the relative
standing of each household or individual would be shaped in large part by whether they lived in a
poor or a wealthy state. In general, the available empirical data on national incomes show
unequivocally that inequality between countries in the twentieth century was higher than the inequality
exhibited within any single national state (Oxfam 2017). Other sources confirm that income inequality
between countries accounted for roughly two-thirds of overall world income inequality in the 1990s
(Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009). Moreover, average incomes in the richest countries far exceed
those in the poorest countries, estimated to be forty to fifty times greater in the former during the
1990s (Bourguignon and Morrisson 2002). Note that location here mainly refers to countries. Ideally,
we would need to consider other locational differences, such as rural/urban within national states in
between which internal migration may occur.
The importance of location to inequality cannot be overestimated: ‘Nearly all the differences in
wages between individuals in rich and poor countries are explained by the location of the work, not
their personal characteristics’ (Pritchett 2006: 20). Although there is much debate about
countervailing trends with respect to the past two decades, mostly due to increasing levels of income
in countries such as China and India (cf. Bourguignon 2015), the unequal pattern of income
distribution has been remarkably stable over the past 200 years (Lindert and Williamson 2003). The
shift from class to location and thus also citizenship is apparent in explanations of economic
privilege. Standard analyses of economic privilege focusing on national systems, for example,
identify class privilege as the decisive factor shaping educational and, eventually, economic privilege
(Bourdieu 1984). By contrast, location-specific privilege is often referred to when seeking to account
for the devaluation of skills and expertise brought by cross-border migrants to immigration countries
(e.g. Bauder 2003).
We arrive at a similar observation when moving from income and labour migration to human
security and forced migration. In today’s global political order, there are now many more sovereign
states than in the nineteenth century, but also states in disarray—as suggested by terms such as state
formation and nation-building, but also state dissolution, state failure, and civil war. The success of
the diffusion of the European model of national state formation across the globe is also a contributing
factor to the patterns of forced migration. One of the paradoxes of this diffusion is that its very
success coincides with internal struggles and with often massive external military interventions and
continued economic domination of states in the global South by those in the global North. Its spread
also relates to the conflicts over establishing and maintaining national state structures following
decolonization (Tilly 1990: chapter 5). As a result, the very success of the model and the concomitant
violent struggles have been accompanied by more and more internal displacement and forced
migration across borders. Asymmetries are thus to be found not only in the economic realm, as
measured, for example, by wide differences in income and wealth between countries in the global
South on the one side and the global North on the other, but also in the political realm (Zolberg,
Suhrke, and Aguayo 1989). Location as a proxy for citizenship matters indeed not only with respect to
material inequalities such as income but also human security. The total number of refugees and
internally displaced people reached more than sixty million in 2015, the highest number since the
Second World War. More than 80 per cent of them remain in the countries of origin (internally
displaced persons (IDPs)) or in nearby countries in the developing world (UNHCR 2016). There is
also a pattern with respect to countries of origin: not surprisingly, the least peaceful countries on the
planet over the past years, according to the Global Peace Index, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and
Somalia, lack efficient government monopoly of violence and rule of law. They have experienced
high rates of forced emigration (Donini, Monsutti, and Scalettaris 2016).
The increased importance of location for life chances is heightened by what has been called the
mobility or migration paradox. On the one hand, as the global economic inequalities and political
power asymmetries suggest, the incentives for cross-border migration are nowadays as high as ever.
Furthermore, images of a better life elsewhere have spread around the globe via mass media,
including social media. Given the growing importance of location over the past 150 years, we should
expect exit as an option to gain importance vis-à-vis voice as a response to global inequalities in the
South–North context (cf. Hirschman 1970). On the other hand, despite such easy access to hope for a
better future, access to cross-border mobility is starkly limited, if not directly contradicted, by state
restrictions. One may even claim that, since the 1970s, crossing borders into states of the global
North has become even more cumbersome for the majority of migrants. Seen in this way the pincer
movement between economic incentives, political force, and eased access to images of hope on the
one hand, and growing mobility restrictions for many migrants, especially those deemed low-skilled,
on the other, has tightened. Hence one of the most plausible responses to increasing life chances,
given the importance of location in a globalized world, is increasingly stifled and prohibited.
The increased status of location has implications for all sorts of cross-border mobility, not only
for relatively voluntary movements but also for forced migration. Socio-economic inequalities as
well as direct and indirect violence surround the spread of capitalist modes of production and the
national state model as global patterns. These developments are transnational not only in the sense of
cross-border migration as such but also with respect to the consequences of migration in the regions
of origin, transit, and immigration. In the wake of social inequalities in the nineteenth century, the
main response in what is nowadays called the global North was social protection through national
welfare states. The term welfare state here refers to providing members of the state with a certain
amount of social protection, that is, social security based on notions of equality of national citizens,
by regulating and redistributing social risks and providing services.1 Clearly, state-sponsored social
protection is oriented toward norms: it ‘refers to public actions taken in response to levels of
vulnerability, risks, and deprivation, which are deemed socially unacceptable within a given polity
and society’ (Norton, Conway, and Foster 2001: 21). Such forms of social protection include rights
and public policies meant to address the risks caused by labour market participation and other realms
of social and economic life, such as challenges to health, but also in proactive ways such as
education. Typical ways to deliver social protection are state-sponsored schemes, for example in
social insurance against risks such as accidents, unemployment, health, and old age, and social
services offered by public and private organizations. Viewed globally, equally important are schemes
based on kinship and community ties. With respect to migrants, financial remittances, mobility for
care, and information are important elements involved in social protection (Faist et al. 2015; Parella
and Speroni 2018).
Through migration, social protection connects various social spaces around the world, and speaks
to central concerns not only of national welfare states in the global North but also to what could be
called developmental states in the global South. For example, the majority of goals listed in the
Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by the members of the United Nations (UN) in 2015,
refer to basic elements of social protection, such as reducing hunger and poverty, ensuring access to
clean water, health care, and education, empowering women, decreasing social inequalities across
the globe but also within countries, and protecting the human environment (UN 2015).
The term ‘social question’ is not just another term for social inequalities. Social inequality can be
understood as a phenomenon that occurs when some actors, due to their social position, tend to obtain
valuable goods more frequently than others. By contrast, the social question mainly concerns the
perception of and the political mobilization around social inequalities—based on norms of equality—
as unfair or unjust on the one hand, and the legitimation of social inequalities on the other. As to the
norms of equality, nineteenth-century workers’ movements did not organize around the issue of
poverty but around the claim to equality. Nowadays, the politics around inequalities in migration is
ubiquitous, ranging from debates over the causes and drivers of cross-border migration to
demographic challenges in emigration and immigration countries, resentment over competition
between native populations with newcomers or returnees, and, more generally, conflicts over the
social integration of migrants in areas of settlement and return, and social integration of political
communities on state and local levels with respect to changing understandings of membership (see,
e.g. Messina and Lahav 2006).
Cross-border migration, involving as it does gross asymmetries and social inequalities between
regions of the world and concomitant political conflicts, is an ideal field for studying the
transnationalized social question. Inequalities across states constitute a context in which cross-border
migration becomes attractive, and are politicized within national states by way of immigration and
emigration.
The social question is a transnationalized question because of the cross-border transactions
involved. The core question to be answered is thus: how is cross-border migration constituted as the
social question of our times? This framing question requires an analysis of how social inequalities
are constituted and reconstituted in the course of cross-border migration; hence an analysis of the
social mechanisms of the (re)production of inequalities and the quest for more equalities. Four key
areas associated with this core problem are examined in this volume. Part I analyses exactly what has
changed since the nineteenth century, when the social question was discussed for the first time, and
what kinds of social inequalities are created in the migratory process and how. Part II discusses how
social protection across borders ameliorates and reproduces patterns of inequalities. Migrants and
other categories of mobile persons, such as those engaged in circular mobility, sustain dense and
continuous ties across borders, in transnational social spaces; therefore, the focus is on how social
protection is organized in the context of cross-border migrations and the impact it has on social
inequalities. Part III examines the consequences of social inequalities in cross-border migration for
political struggles over access to (social) rights and membership, and the dynamics involved in such
struggles in immigration contexts around market liberalization, de-commodification, cultural
pluralism, and securitization, and in emigration contexts with respect to diasporas and the migration–
development nexus. Part IV looks to future engagement, and how the transnationalized social question
is to be seen in light of environmental destruction and climate change. It also examines more generally
the role played by social scientists in portraying the transnationalized social question in the public
arena.
The main thesis proposed here is that the growing importance of location and thus membership in
states for life chances is driving the (re)production of inequalities and the politics around the nexus of
cross-border migration and social protection. Although claims to equality have risen and the potential
for cross-border migration has increased, the welfare state and the security state (characteristics of
the global North with their inclusionary logic toward (quasi-)full members and exclusionary social
closure toward non-members) prevents larger-scale cross-border migration. At first sight, we would
expect exit as an option to gain importance vis-à-vis voice as a response to global inequalities. Yet
what we observe are developments which counteract this expectation. First, given the restrictive
immigration policies of states in the global North, it is not exit and entry of labour but the mobility of
capital that has strongly increased over the past decades (Held et al. 1999). Restrictive policies have
also meant that exit of citizen-workers is not a credible threat to those governing in the states of
emigration. Second, looking at immigration states, voice around class has increasingly been
complemented by voice around cultural heterogeneities, such as ethnicity, race, and religion, but also
more general ones such as gender. Overall, the political mobilization around social inequalities—a
necessary condition to speak of the transnationalized social question—has moved from a focus on
redistribution to one which also includes issues of recognition; from issues of exploitation in the
production process to those of inclusion and exclusion in additional fields, such as politics, law, and
education. These processes have been accompanied by large-scale social transformations, often
called globalization. In Europe, for example, the transformation of dense national social protection is
not compensated by corresponding transnational or supranational policies. This situation in turn
partly feeds into further political mobilization around inequalities, not only by migrants but by native
populations. Nonetheless, currently, the issue of exploitation is coming back with a vengeance; this
time not only through the exploitation of humans by humans but of nature by humans, resulting in a
widespread ‘loss of habitat’ (Sassen 2016).
Today’s transnationalized social question with respect to migration occurs in a context
fundamentally different from that of the nineteenth century. On the emigration side, in the nineteenth
century, it was possible for the poor of Europe to migrate to settler colonies in America and
elsewhere. The same was true of the South (East) Asian migration system. Despite—or because of—
the fact that location and membership have become more important for life chances, genuine
opportunities have become fewer and fewer. In the nineteenth century, large-scale outmigration
functioned like a demographic safety valve for Europe (Hoerder 2003). For today’s potential cross-
border movers the options are more limited. A lower percentage of people from countries in the
global South are able to move to the global North (cf. Segal 1993). It is ironic that at the time when
location matters even more for life chances than before, there are fewer chances for cross-border
migration. On the immigration side, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was often
resistance against migrant labourers and refugees, and efforts were made to select only the most
wanted and welcomed. Today, the barriers to entry have risen considerably, in large part because
controls at borders, especially remote controls, have become more sophisticated, and selection
processes are aiming more at high-skilled rather than low-skilled migrants. The proportion of
migrants with a tertiary education (college or university degree) is increasing. The number of
migrants entering countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) with such qualifications has grown by two-thirds since 2000, reaching about a third of all
migrants in the 2010s (UN-DESA 2013: 1).
Cross-border migration is a crucial research field for understanding social inequalities and
responses to them, such as social protection, around the world. There is a transnational puzzle: social
life is increasingly characterized by cross-border linkages, while primary access to resources
regarding social protection continues, to a large extent, to be linked to the national welfare state in the
global North or the development state in the global South. In the nineteenth century and the first half of
the twentieth, the conflict between capital and labour became the main axis of political contention in
addressing the social question. That division was also the object of compromise in national welfare
states in Europe. In the global South, the idea of development came to characterize the role of the
state after the Second World War in the context of the Cold War. Migration, by and large, can be seen
as a form of transnationalization from below, often framed in public and academic debates as a
growing chasm between those who benefit from globalization—the intensified movement of capital,
goods, and services across borders—and those who objectively and/or subjectively have lost
(Graham 2001; Vision Europe Summit 2017). Against this background a spate of recent scholarship
made far-reaching claims regarding the importance of mobility but also of cross-border interactions
more generally for life chances. In the words of Ulrich Beck, ‘[t]he possibilities for border-
transcending interactions and mobility have become important factors influencing the positioning in
the hierarchy of inequality in the global age’ (2012: 1028). By contrast, the local/national then
denotes an unfavourable position in a system of inequalities in that the ‘local in a globalized world is
a sign of social deprivation and degradation’ (Bauman 1998: 2–3). The global–local binary,
sometimes portrayed as a global–national binary, is thus used to attribute life chances on different
scales, connected to the claim that this is a relatively new development brought about in the course of
increasing cross-border transactions of capital over the past few decades.

Cross-Border Migration and Inequalities

The term ‘migrant’ is used here when migration refers to those who move into new contexts, while the
term ‘emigrant’ is taken to mean those migrants who leave their state of origin for another country, and
‘immigrant’ is employed to describe the perspective of the immigration country into which migrants
immigrate. And while there is a politico-legal distinction between labour migrants on the one hand
and refugees on the other, the term migrant is used as an umbrella term referring to all those cross-
border movers who stay abroad for more than a year.
It should be noted that there is no universally agreed-upon definition of the term migrant. The
concept does often connote persons who stay abroad for more than one year (UN 2016b: 18). Yet
there are other forms of mobility, for example, which are often not counted as forms of migration,
such as international student mobility, circular migration, seasonal mobility, posted or seconded
worker mobility, or expatriate worker mobility. Here, the term migrant thus encompasses highly
diverse types of people on the move, both within and between countries: people who are permanent
migrants, temporary contract labour, professional and business migrants; students; people who are
forced to move as asylum seekers and refugees; people who move from the rural countryside to cities;
people moving for marriage and family reasons; people who exit areas of environmental degradation;
people who escape from persecution and conflict within their own countries; people who are
trafficked; and people who engage in onward movements to other countries, or who return to the
country of origin. Moreover, people often shift between these categories: they may enter a country as
tourists or visitors, for example, but then are stranded, overstay, work, or apply for asylum. Some
may settle permanently, and eventually become citizens. Also, internal migrants may at times move
across national state borders and become international migrants (Van Hear 2009). All of these forms
of mobility are also included in the broad definition of migration used here.
In a very broad sense, contemporary cross-border South–North migration is a late consequence of
European domination of the world through colonialism and imperialism. It can be seen as a sort of
post-colonial counter flow, instigated partly by the European conquest of territories in the rest of the
world. Cultural heterogeneities such as race and ethnicity can serve as crucial examples of how
patterns of domination were transferred and adapted back and forth from the colonized world to those
of the colonizers. Inequalities are thus patterned not only along class antagonism (Karl Marx) or
social strata (Max Weber), but also along differences such as race, ethnicity, religion, and language—
along with other important ones such as gender. Not surprisingly, most of these inequality patterns
have been co-produced in the global North, for example, racial oppression—a process aptly called
‘internal colonialism’ (Blauner 1972).
Cross-border migration is a strategic research site to analyse how social inequalities have been
perceived, have become a matter of contention, and have been settled into political compromises.
Cross-border migration is a visible reflection of global inequalities arising in manifold contexts
characterized by inequalities within and between states, such as rapid population growth and the
dearth of opportunities for making a living, a shortage of jobs for the young skilled and unskilled
entering labour markets, unstable political situations (even civil wars)—and a host of additional
factors. An abundance of literature deals with the link between migration and inequalities, but
primarily indirectly, often through topics such as migration and development, or the integration of
migrants in destination countries. In order to grasp the nexus of migration and inequalities, we first
need to take heed of the specific characteristics of contemporary cross-border migration. On the basis
of this picture it is then possible to gauge the importance of the change of location for life chances in
economic, political, and cultural perspectives.
Examining migration helps us to understand the links between the disparate, fragmented social
spaces of unequal life chances and social protection. Social protection strategies comprise, at the
individual and collective levels, multiple forms of coping with the risks associated with production
and (un)employment, education, training, senior care, health, housing, disability, family formation and
children, and old age. Going even further, social protection strategies also matter in contexts of threat,
such as wars, when people flee violence, and in processes of environmental destruction, such as
natural disasters and anthropogenic climate change.
International or, more precisely, cross-border migration is defined in general terms as people’s
movement to other regions leading to temporary or long-term forms of settlement and resettlement
(Bartram, Poros, and Monforte 2014). The most important drivers of immigration from European but
also non-European regions were labour needs based on recruitment programmes and colonial links,
as well as humanitarian circumstances (Emmer and Lucassen 2012), and family reunification relating
to both factors. Turning from migrant stocks to migrant flows, the picture looks somewhat different.
When seen across the globe, the rate of cross-border migration has not increased over the past twenty
years (Abel and Sander 2014). Bilateral flow data suggest a stable intensity of global five-year
migration flows at around 0.6 per cent of world population since 1995. Nor has Europe been at the
centre of such flows: the largest movements have occurred between South and West Asia, from Latin
to North America, and within Africa. Overall, the fastest-growing flow is from the global South to the
global North, although South–South flows are also quite significant (Wihtol de Wenden 2016a). As to
migrant stocks, between 1960 and 2010, the share of migrants living in OECD countries increased
from 37 per cent to 56 per cent; by 2009, 80 per cent of all migrants were from so-called developing
countries.
Seen in economic terms, in an ideal-typical, neo-classical world without political boundaries,
economic logic would work the following way (Hamilton and Whaley 1984): labour power would
migrate from the global South, where wages are low, to the global North, where wages are much
higher. Here, South and North signify not only migration into Europe, but also include, for example,
migration from Romania to France, or within European regions. Devoid of an oversupply of labour,
this emigration would stimulate capital investment in the global South, and immigration into the
global North would lower average wages. In turn, this would stimulate more immigration and more
capital investment in the global South—until both parts of the world arrive at about the same mix of
factors of production with respect to capital and labour. In other words, economic rationale would
predict that the world economy functions as a system of communicating vessels.
Some observers even claim that a truly free flow of people across the world would, in fact,
provide the fastest means for thoroughly transforming the conditions that have characterized global
stratification for the past two hundred years—so much so that, according to some estimates, the
welfare-generating functions of cross-border migration would surpass those of free trade (Rodrik
2001). Yet the empirical data suggest that such expectations are wildly overdrawn. Over the past
decades, cross-border migration has done little to nothing to narrow the income and life-quality
chasm between the global South and the global North (see Chapter 3). Going back to the logic of
communicating vessels, one may conclude that global and European cross-border mobility is simply
too low to achieve the expected effects of decreasing income inequalities across the globe (Fischer,
Martin, and Straubhaar 1997).
Nonetheless, given the persistent inequalities in income and, more generally, life chances, the
current situation across the world seems to point toward a high potential for massive cross-border
migration. The mobilization of this potential is highly contingent on various meso-level factors, such
as the transfer of social capital, and thus selective mobility and massive immobility is a much more
accurate point of departure (Faist 2000): in the global South, outmigration often results from the
experience of relative deprivation, that is, the perception of a massive gap in life chances, although
the level of material comfort may be on the rise. In addition, material conditions are not the only
driver; the very fabric of social life has been torn in many emigration regions (Delgado Wise 2014).
One has only to think of the ordeal of people escaping from socio-economic destitution,
environmental degradation, and drawn-out and internecine wars in regions such as the Middle East
and Central Asia. Forced migrants from these countries risk their lives and well-being in dangerous
journeys where they confront often corrupt authorities, violent intermediaries, and always treacherous
routes in their desperate attempt to reach European shores and countries where xenophobia is on the
rise. In a nutshell, states in the global South seem to be characterized by a great number of
‘superfluous people’,2 resulting from demographic growth, who cannot be fully absorbed in labour
markets; violence which cannot be contained within failed and failing states; and—patently visible in
the recent past—immediately visible reactions to direct interventions by European and North
American powers in states such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, and Congo.
The location of a state in the maze of global political and economic hierarchies is important both
for the processes of mobility across borders as such and for temporary and permanent adaptation in
countries of destination. Membership status is crucial for partaking in social, political, and cultural
rights and benefits. Full membership in a polity, citizenship, provides for categorical inclusion and
exclusion, the constitution of insiders and outsiders, the established and the excluded. Exclusivist
inclusion allows insiders active participation in the place of residence at the expense of outsiders.
One could thus argue that the key institutional feature linking relatively low inequalities within
wealthier countries and high inequalities between countries is the exclusion of people from poorer
countries by wealthier states (Carens 2000; Shachar 2009). Yet, ultimately, such a focus does not go
far enough. The national state principle is also institutionalized in the welfare state, which aims to
regulate market activities and redistribute income. Not only do citizens benefit but, to varying
degrees, so also do migrants who have settled in states that provide rights-based social protection.
Therefore, the analysis has to consider the ambiguous character of the national welfare state.
Viewed across the globe, the forms of exclusion have varied through the course of history. In the
past several hundred years, cross-border migration has occurred in several broad stages if we take
Europe as a point of departure (on other regions, see McKeown 2004): European-dominated,
colonization-driven migration reigned supreme from c.1500 to 1800, followed by the age of
imperialism, coercion, and industrialization-driven migration within Europe and between Europe and
the New World from about 1800 to the start of the First World War. It was in this period, toward the
latter part of the nineteenth century, that countries of immigration institutionalized migration control,
albeit not as far-reaching with respect to intensity and extent as in later times. In short, selective
social closure through national states nowadays patterns the incentives for cross-border mobilities
and the much more widespread feature of relative immobility. In other words, in order for a
competitive national state to increase acceptance of open borders for global goods and services,
social closure directed at the same global world, based on nationalist considerations, may be a
functional necessity. Welfare-state inclusion for citizens and the regulation of labour markets are a
requirement for economic expansion in global markets.
Stark differences around the world relate to issues such as the degree of successful monopoly of
control over territory, efficiency of administration, supply of basic resources in education and health,
and the degree of equality in exercising political liberty. In some cases, voice may not be a viable
option, so exit remains, for the most part, the only alternative—especially in cases where persecution
is rampant along heterogeneities, such as religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and political beliefs.
Global asymmetries in locations are also manifest in the cultural realm. Based on economic and
political differences and power inequalities between the global North and the global South, the
politics of departure in emigration states and the politics of admission in immigration contexts are
culturally embedded. For example, emigration countries have long cast emigrants abroad as ‘traitors’
but quite a few of these states have started to embrace them as representatives of a sort of global
nation, and embrace self-declared or state-pronounced diasporas whose investments are tapped into
for economic development (Gamlen 2014). Moreover, mirroring the increasing tolerance toward dual
citizenship in immigration countries over the past two decades, emigration states have begun to
accept multiple citizenship in an instrumental way to promote their interests abroad. This means that
even in cases of exit, states seek to regain and mobilize the loyalty of their (former) citizens. This is
of interest because loyalty is fundamentally a resource which prevents exit. Nowadays, in the global
North, heterogeneities in the course of immigration have increased again, for example with respect to
languages, religions, and ethnicities (Kraus 2008). Terms such as hybridity, mixed race, and people of
colour abound in regard to (self-)descriptions of cultural identifications, which stand in stark contrast
to political debates around the preservation of national culture in immigration countries and the
(alleged) threat through newcomer categories, such as Islam, in Europe. It is thus not only politico-
economic asymmetries but perceived threats to cultural cohesion which are driving the politics of
social inequalities.

Heterogeneities, Inequalities, and Social Mechanisms

The walls and fences encountered by migrants on their way to immigration regions constitute a factual
barrier to the majority of potential and actual migrants from the global South, that is, against 85 per
cent of the world’s population. In short, there is a global hierarchy of mobility. In the global North,
some categories of migrants are economically wanted; for example, labour migrants from the global
South are partly welcome, nowadays especially, if they belong to the category socially defined as the
highly skilled (Kapur and McHale 2005). Politicians, for their part, are torn between the interests of
capital on the one hand and appealing to voters on the other. While capitalists are interested in cheap
but above all docile labour, voters are generally inclined toward restriction because some of them
fear competition in labour and housing markets (Freeman 1995).
Borders involved in migration cannot be conceived of as mere territorial demarcations. The
borders also operate socially in the form of boundaries. Such social boundaries serve to distinguish
categories of people, their rights, their social status, and thus the recognition of their cultural and
social practices. A common observation made in the context of contemporary immigration in the
global North from the 1950s and 1960s onwards is that the political debates around immigration and
its socio-economic and socio-cultural consequences have shifted focus from seeing migrants as class-
based actors (and their self-perception as such) to seeing them primarily as cultural actors, such as
members of distinct religious communities.
The ever-present politics of identities around cross-border migration is nowadays characterized
by the intersection of class with nationality, citizenship, and also other heterogeneities, such as gender
and various cultural characteristics like religion and ethnicity, which matter now for political
struggles over the issue of cross-border migration (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991). In immigration
countries, this intersection has triggered on-and-off debates about the impact of immigration on
employment and social protection, on the one hand, and national identity and security issues, on the
other. In emigration countries, discussions have been framed in terms of the link between migration
and development, as exemplified by the resurgence of discussions on remittances in international
organizations since the early 2000s (Chapter 3). The global horizon of perceiving differences in
public and academic debates has moved from social class to a more complex form of diversity, the
entanglements of class and cultural heterogeneities.
Also, in emigration regions, cultural issues play a significant role in state–diaspora relationships.
Appeals to common ethnicity and nationality or religion are used by both diasporic actors and state
actors to mobilize the voice and loyalty of emigrants in the context of emigration (Bauböck and Faist
2010). It could well be that the significance of class has not really receded but that conflicts around
cultural heterogeneities are an integral element of post-migration processes (cf. Munck 2006). What
is certain is that there are other socially constituted heterogeneities, such as gender, ethnicity, and
race, around which political conflicts have evolved. While we do not know how much of global
income inequality is accounted for by heterogeneities other than class, there is some plausible
evidence that gender, ethnicity, and religion have also served as rallying differences in political
debates around social inequalities (Faist and Ulbricht 2015). The most promising avenue for
understanding the political dynamics of inequalities is to move from heterogeneities—not only
heterogeneities related to macro-structural features, such as core/periphery relations and state
structures, but also heterogeneities related to group characteristics—to social inequalities.
We can distinguish various sorts of heterogeneities, varying along ‘a given nominal parameter’
(Blau 1977: 77). Although heterogeneities, such as gender, are not devoid of inequality, it is helpful to
distinguish analytically between heterogeneity and inequality. As such, heterogeneities signal
difference between persons or groups. And difference is not the same as inequality. It is important to
emphasize that the distinction between heterogeneities and inequalities is a purely analytical one
(Diewald and Faist 2011). Heterogeneities are not meant to be understood as pre- or proto-social
categories.
Heterogeneities, such as gender, ethnicity, age, legal status, religion, and the degree to which
persons or groups entertain ties across borders (transnationality), are relevant for inequalities
because of the ascription of groups to categories. Categorical distinctions and cultural classifications
of heterogeneities attributed to individuals and groups have tangible implications for the distribution
of material and symbolic resources (Lamont, Beljean, and Clair 2014). By implication,
categorizations along heterogeneities result in inequalities only if such transactions reproduce a rather
stable and enduring boundary between categories. Hence, the term ‘categorical inequality’ (Massey
2007) is appropriate to describe the processes of categorization (successful boundary-making) along
heterogeneities. This leads us to the recognition that categorical distinctions based on cultural
heterogeneities may be as important as structural determinants, hence ‘socio-cultural boundaries’
matter (Lamont and Molnár 2002). The boundaries which are constructed and de-constructed between
categories are variable and part of social relations: ‘The boundary is not a spatial fact with
sociological consequences, but a sociological fact that forms itself spatially’ (Simmel 1992 [1908]:
143). The spatial boundaries are not merely physical facts, but are also ‘sociological occurrences’
which structure the spatial and social relations. Simmel’s analysis, for example, shows that spatial
boundaries are a social construction that structures the relationships between people and between
social groups. The very act of boundary construction underlying inequality-relevant categorizations is
interwoven with social agency.
The term social inequality is of relatively recent vintage. It has become a household term in the
social sciences only since the 1970s. Here, the concept of inequality is understood as going beyond
income inequality and is thus used in the plural. Social inequalities consist of the uneven distribution
of costs and benefits with respect to goods among social units such as individuals, groups,
organizations, regions, and states. The goods or resources involved may be economic (e.g. income,
ownership of land, labour power), political (e.g. fiscal authority, workplace authority, governmental
authority), cultural (e.g. lifestyle), social (e.g. access to social networks and social capital, prestige,
reputation), legal (e.g. rights, citizenship), and human (e.g. skills, formal education, and cultural
capital). Inequalities refer to boundaries between categories. In other words, inequalities arise from
categorizations of heterogeneities. There are differential rewards based upon the categorizations of
heterogeneities, such as wage differences along gendered or ethnic lines. In short, inequalities are
those categorizations of heterogeneities that generate unequal returns and have been institutionalized
as ‘durable inequalities’ (Tilly 1998).
Different schools of thought emphasize distinct aspects of resource distribution. For example, neo-
classical economists aim at equality of overall welfare, political philosophers focus on equality of
resources or equality of access to advantage, and institutionalist economists, such as Amartya Sen,
emphasize the equality of capabilities and are thus concerned with individuals’ freedom to achieve
the goals they value (Sen 1999). Yet all agree that resource distribution makes a difference for
opportunities and life chances—and refer to the disparities of opportunity and access to resources but
also to outcomes in the availability of valued goods. These various forms of capital can be conceived
as a basis for the ‘social relation of power’ which has a differentiating and stratifying effect between
individuals and groups (Swartz 2013: 51, based on Bourdieu 1986). Such inequalities are not
necessarily directly observable, especially if we consider deep patterns of inequalities, such as class
structure (cf. Van Hear 2014a). At the other end of the spectrum, others are more readily observable
and measurable, such as social mobility of individuals and groups.
Heterogeneities are involved in making boundaries between people, such as between men and
women, white and black, but also gradual distinctions along continua, for example, age and
transnationality—the latter referring to the degree to which agents entertain cross-border ties. Above
all, dichotomous heterogeneities serve to control groups, for example in the workforce. Fine-grained
heterogeneities such as place of residence (e.g. postal code as a proxy) may serve as markers which
are relevant, for example, for the selection of workers. From the point of view of the social question,
heterogeneities not only serve to slot people into more or less desirable social positions in fields
such as employment, housing, and education, but heterogeneities in social boundaries are also the site
of resistance to such categorizations. A case in point is categorization along religious lines, for
example Muslim vs. Christian, in countries of immigration in Europe. Not only do we find the use of
the category ‘Muslim’ for virtually all who hail from the Middle East, but ‘Muslim’ has also,
conversely, come to constitute a countervailing identity, sometimes based on an ideology of
victimhood (Wiktorowicz 2004).
The norms of equality which serve various social agents as a yardstick in perceiving and
measuring inequalities stand in stark tension with the ever-present forms of naturalizing inequalities.
Immigration in Europe has been accompanied by the culturalization of migrants in the form of the
national state for over a hundred years. Such culturalization has been intricately connected to social
hierarchies and inequalities in the form of racism and religious exclusion. In other words, it is not
only injustice in the (re)distribution of resources and the mechanism of exploitation which matters for
the perception of inequalities, but also perceived injustices in cultural domination, that is, non-
recognition and disrespect through the mechanism of oppression (Fraser 2000). In essence, the meta-
idea of equality in democratic systems propels the perceptions of inequalities.
In order to explore how heterogeneities are implied in the (de)construction of inequalities, it is
useful to start out from the basic assumption that identifying the key social mechanisms is an important
step in reconstructing the processes that are relevant to inequalities’ constitution and persistence
(Therborn 2014: 54–67), and the politics around inequalities in the social question. In the most
general sense, the term social mechanism refers to recurrent pathways, linking specified initial
conditions—not necessarily causes in the strict sense—and specific outcomes over a variety of cases
(McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001: 24). Formally, one can thus define social mechanisms (M) as
links between initial conditions (input I) and effect (outcome O), expressed: I-M-O. The
understanding of mechanisms advanced here is not that they represent strong causal links between two
discrete phenomena (e.g. ‘if A, then B’; Hedström and Swedberg 1998). Rather, mechanisms help to
denote processes which are ‘composed of chains or aggregations of actors confronting problem
situations and mobilizing more or less habitual responses’ (Gross 2009: 368). On an analytical level,
one may roughly differentiate between mechanisms that function at an intermediate level—that is,
among small groups and networks of individuals (Tilly 2005: chapters 2 and 3)—and those that
operate at the level of macro-societal institutions (Mayntz 2004). Mechanisms at the intermediate
level shape connections between individuals, groups, and interpersonal networks, that is, relations
between individual and collective actors. At the societal level, macro-institutional or systemic
mechanisms refer to the significance of aggregated and concatenated transactions and their features
for the emergence of social inequalities.

Toward the Transnationalized Social Question

Although cross-border migration in its current incarnation has not propelled social transformation but
is rather a reflection of on-going and far-reaching social changes (cf. Castles, Özkul, and Cubas
2015), it is a crucial and strategic research field in order to inquire into the legitimation of
inequalities and associated politics and policies designed to address these issues (e.g. relevant both
within the borders of national states and beyond). The social question—which is always a
combination of economic, political, and cultural aspects—concerns the legitimation of inequalities in
an asymmetric social world.
The social question is an old political term, which dates back to the nineteenth century. It captures
the conflict between capital and labour—its politicization but also the outcomes of contention, such
as labour and labour market legislation and the emergence of the welfare state since the late
nineteenth century. We now live at a time when it is important to ask this question again because
several of the solutions to the social question—the national welfare state and state–citizen relations
more generally—are in a process of transformation: new supranational entities such as the EU have
been formed, and the perception has emerged of increased global independence in fields such as
cross-border migration and social and labour standards. Concomitantly, cross-border migration has
emerged as a matter of intense political dispute (again), both at national state level and
internationally. The old solution, of coupling the welfare state and immigration control, established
mainly in the wake of the First World War and the expansion of fledgling welfare states in Europe—
namely, the obligation to carry passports and obtain visas for crossing borders—has become more
fragile. Most important, cross-border migration has accelerated aspects of the social question that
reach beyond nineteenth- and early twentieth-century class conflict. This is particularly visible in
questions about how to deal with the admission of forced migrants in the EU and in conflicts around
cultural issues such as immigrants’ religion.
With respect to cross-border migration and its consequences, the social question has always been
a socio-cultural question. This is so for two reasons. The first is that processes endogenous to
migration tend to involve primarily cultural issues as a consequence of settlement, transnational
relations, and return. At the beginning stages of cross-border migration, migrants as labour migrants
usually see themselves and are perceived by others as a sort of Homo oeconomicus (Piore 1979),
intent on pursuing better life chances. It is usually in the later stages of the immigration process that
migrants perceive themselves not only as socio-economic but also politico-cultural actors and are
perceived as such by non-migrants (Zolberg 1987). This consideration also applies to the emigration
perspective. With respect to labour migration, it is usually later in the process that emigrants,
organized in entities such as Hometown Associations (HTAs), seek political influence and that
emigration states attempt to woo their diasporas. Nativist and populist opposition to migration often
forms early on as a response to immigration. But immigrants themselves take longer to organize. In
contrast, those forced migrants categorized as political refugees tend to organize early on to seek
influence on homeland politics (Shain 2005). Nonetheless, the dominant trend is clearly visible: the
culturalization of issues around immigration and emigration is a phenomenon endogenous to migration
processes, usually associated with basic issues of membership in both immigration and emigration
contexts. Also, situations of cross-border migration exemplify the utility of conceiving norms of
equality as an element used by social agents in driving conflicts. Newcomers may act as an irritant to
established citizens who think of themselves as equals in the face of common citizenship. Migrants
may also be conceived as competitors. It is plausible to assume that newly arrived migrant (groups)
are—in the first period at least—in positions of lesser privilege with respect to the balance of power.
If irritants are perceived as a threat, they are accompanied by efforts to downgrade or even stigmatize
the newcomers. It is a solid empirical finding for immigration situations in Europe over the past
decades that, in order to account for politics opposed to migration and newcomers, perceived threats
to collective cultural identifications are often more important than the view that immigrants are
detrimental to employment prospects (Hampshire 2013: 23–4). The kind of exclusionist politics
revolving around perceived threat is usually called into question upon the shifting of the balance of
power between the autochthonous population and migrants. It is then that the privileges of the
established groups may be called into question (Elias 1994 [1965]). And it is often the case that such
conflicts do not concern material distribution only but also self-images and we-group feelings of both
non-migrants and migrants, especially in immigration countries.
In short, heterogeneities along class and culture, and concomitant inequalities, are not exclusive
but rather sequential: often, politico-economic issues dominate at the start and politico-cultural
matters later on. This pattern is somewhat different with respect to forced migration flows, especially
when they are considered in humanitarian and/or human rights terms. Then these terms also constitute
a major part of public debates, politics, and policies. But this does not alter the fundamental
sequence. The second reason has to do with a general trend which is exogenous to migratory
processes. Over the past decades social issues have become increasingly characterized as revolving
around cultural in contrast to class issues. Disparities in life chances have been conceptualized not
only in a vertical manner, as in class, but also in horizontal ways. The latter has implied that while
class is important, it is not always the only nor necessarily the most important heterogeneity around
which opportunities are distributed. In feminist analysis, for example, the triad of class, race, and
gender became prominent as signalling triple oppression (Combahee River Collective 1977), with
subsequent authors extending the list of relevant heterogeneities (Collins 2015). In other debates,
class-oriented protest has been complemented or even replaced by artistic critique (Boltanski and
Chiapello 1999)—the idea that social inequalities lose some of their relevance if the standards of
evaluation change, for example, not using cars because it is environmentally harmful to do so.
The responses to the old social question around class can be seen in state–citizen relations, in
particular the notion of rights. One of the main solutions was the national welfare state. When talking
about the transnationalized social question, we should be quite careful in not imputing a teleology.
For example, most states around the world have not followed the model of European-style welfare
states as a solution to the capital–labour divide. Nonetheless, part of the transformation has been the
emergence of what is called the third generation of rights, namely, collective rights promoting
solidarity among peoples, groups, and communities. They encompass rights to culture, to the
environment, and to sustainable development. Although it is a contested question whether such
cultural rights belong to citizenship and whether such collective rights guarantee liberty (and equality)
within groups,3 the persistence of debates over multiculturalism indicates that the universe of rights,
claims, and contentions has widened. Nonetheless, it should not be concluded prematurely that
concerns with cultural rights have replaced concerns with political equality and social rights.
An important ingredient in understanding the dynamics of the transnationalized social question is
the role of norms of equality. The legitimation and contestation of inequalities oscillates between
norms of equality, often operationalized as human, political, and social rights, on the one hand, and
the naturalization of inequalities on the other. The latter position is often driven by efforts at exclusive
equality for members of a particular social unit, such as citizens in a national welfare state,
underpinned by ideas of cultural homogenization. In such contexts, migrants are sometimes depicted
as culturally deficient—for example, with respect to gender equality (Jolly 2005). To the extent the
material and symbolic inequalities involved become a matter of public dispute in emigration and/or
immigration regions, we can speak of a social question.
For those responding to the global social inequalities just roughly sketched, the transnationalized
social question is situated in between the options of exit and voice. If we compare the nineteenth
century with the beginning of the twenty-first, the following picture emerges. At the time Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels were writing The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1978 [1848])—the
first comprehensive analysis of capitalism whose features have come to fruition in a fully fledged
way only recently after the demise of true socialism in the Eastern bloc—the economic position of
workers across the world was roughly similar. The bulk of workers who lived below their countries’
average wage levels would not have had incomes that differed by more than a ratio of two to one.
Today, in the early part of the twenty-first century, the gap in mean incomes often differs by a factor of
ten to one (Milanovic 2016: chapter 3). While emerging-market growth in categories such as the
BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, especially in India and China—
seems to have somewhat narrowed global inequality between national states over the past years,
income inequality within national states, including many large emerging markets, has been rising
(Pavcnik 2011). Overall, global inequality measured by the standard indicators, like the Gini index,
has decreased. Factors contributing to this development have been the increase of incomes and the
rise of Asia, essentially China and India. Yet we are faced with an ironic situation: around the turn
from the second to the third millennium the conditions for a truly integrated world market were
present as never before in human history. Yet it is exactly at this juncture in time that it has become
overly obvious that Marx and Engels’ exhortation of ‘workers of the world unite’ was even more
distant than in the late nineteenth and throughout the first three-quarters of the twentieth century.
Instead, cultural conflicts have become very visible, not least in the field of cross-border migration. It
is in this sense that we could say: ‘A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration’
(Hardt and Negri 2000: 213).

A Note on Methodology
This book follows the observation that in a world with increasing socio-economic and political
connectivity across borders, the production of inequalities, the perception of inequalities, the
understanding of social justice, and the politics around such imbalances have transnationalized, that
is, have been criss-crossing borders of national states through the diffusion of ideas and practices, the
formation of social structures spanning several states such as transnational social spaces, and the
relevance of cross-border interdependence for political debates and decisions within inter- and
supranational organizations, national states, and local structures. More specifically, in the field of
migration, cross-border transactions among categories such as migrants and their significant others,
and indeed the whole migration complex, constitute a significant part of overall ties and practices.
Yet public resources and institutions controlling such aspects as redistribution and institutional
regulation intended to address the consequences of heterogeneities and social inequalities are
regulated above all on the national state and international level.
The transnationalized social question is thus a puzzle, for it is not simply a matter of
transnationalization across and beyond national borders—that is, networks across borders and
common responses of national states4 (and the European Union (EU)) to controlling and regulating
international migration. It is also a matter of transnationalized debates and conflicts within national
states (Faist 1995a). For example, although there are partial global regimes, such as the Geneva
Convention (1951), addressing the plight of refugees, and partial supranational regimes, such as the
EU’s social policy arrangements, national states have remained dominant actors in these fields, which
implies the importance of national public spheres as central sites of political contention. More
generally, a transnational lens helps to shed light on both the creation of a global social and economic
space as a result of market liberalization on the one hand and resistance to such developments in the
form of social movements and nationalist populisms on the other. It includes tenets such as economic
efficiency, efficient deployment of human capital, free markets, choice, and consumer sovereignty.
This economic liberalization has been accompanied by deregulation of labour standards and
privatization of publicly owned companies, among other measures. Accompanying policies and
outcomes include declines in both public spending and redistribution of income. By implication,
market liberalism portrays and treats migrants mainly through the lens of individual human capital.
Market liberalization and opposition to it are akin to the double movement described by Karl Polanyi
for much of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century in Europe—the tension
between market liberalism and left-wing and fascist resistance (Polanyi 2001 [1944]).
Since the nineteenth century, national political arenas, first in the global North and then beyond,
have been linked by flows of people and ideas, models of organization, and repertoires of struggle.
There are flows of capital, services, and people across the borders of national states that do not
necessarily span all parts of the globe equally but that illustrate potentially worldwide linkages and
interdependencies. Examples include the transfer of jobs from high-wage to low-wage regions in the
garment industry, or the social consequences of environmental destruction accelerated by climate
change, such as forced migration. Examples of interconnected transformation processes at the global
level are changes to global constellations of political alliances and hegemonies (Held 2010), and
shifts in economic systems toward market liberalism (Harvey 2007). Moreover, advances in
communication and transportation technologies are associated with transformations. The term ‘space
of flows’ signifies that capital investments, communications, and travel are again accelerating
(Castells 2004; Pries 2008a). In turn, such processes have an impact on the spatial distribution of
migrants, for example, by attracting them to certain locations and industries. Political transformation
is also relevant for migration, as the manifold conflicts around the stability of post-colonial states
attest.
A transnational perspective on the ramifications of these developments is distinct from national,
international, and global approaches in that it does not privilege one unit of analysis above others but
considers different scales according to where substantive social mechanisms operative across
borders of national states can be best observed (Faist 2012; see also Glick Schiller and Cağlar 2012
and Pries 2008b). Such an approach to cross-border inequalities does not, therefore, necessarily take
a fixed unit of reference as a starting point, but looks at a number of different ones, that is, it takes into
account various scales, depending on the question to be answered (Amelina and Faist 2012). Thus, it
is necessary to scrutinize the actual links across not only national borders but also within those
borders, down to the community and the family. The perspective foregrounded here deals with
inequalities in the context of cross-border transactions of groups, persons, organizations, and states.
The units of analysis and of reference could be family or kinship networks, village or professional
communities, but also states and supranational entities such as the EU—in short, any kind of social
formation transcending or occurring across the borders of national states, but also the implications of
such processes for the latter. This approach is appropriate because cross-border transactions may
take place on different scales, and it is by the very practices themselves that agents constitute these
scales in the first place (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994).
One broader implication of this approach is that it is inherently ambiguous when it comes to the
meaning of ‘trans’. In a narrow understanding, it refers to cross-border linkages which are sustained
and not fleeting. In a wider meaning, ‘trans’ means the transgression of the national state and thus a
perspective which does not take the national state as its point of departure but rather the nexus of
various scales, ranging from the global to the local. With respect to cross-border migration,
transnational ties in general and spatial mobility of persons across borders in particular are ways in
which disparate worlds of welfare and economic development are connected. Therefore,
transnationality and mobility are crucial research sites for understanding not only the interdependence
of various parts of the world but also for analysing how agents in very concrete ways straddle
various locations in transnational social fields or spaces.
The term transnational is used here in three ways, which are not necessarily exclusive: (1) cross-
border diffusion of social practices; (2) transnational social spaces; and (3) the transnational as
encapsulated on various scales, such as the local and national.
First, the transnational is used in the context of the conflicts around the diffusion of norms of
equality across the globe, human rights in particular, and the consequences these struggles have for the
politics of inequalities. It is a diffusion perspective (for an institutionalist version, see the world
polity approach by J. W. Meyer et al. 1997). It includes processes of cultural diffusion which may
result, among other things, in isomorphism on the macro-structural scale (e.g. state organization of
social protection) and micro-structural scale (e.g. aspirations of migrants for a better life abroad).
Both scales need to be analysed jointly, for example, when migrants engage in practices across
borders, such as arrangements for collective goods such as family insurance and community practices.
Seen in this way, a transnational lens thus uses selected elements of broader theories about the
diffusion of world culture or world system theories. It links various scales in a top-down manner by
observing that certain global/universal norms, such as rational organizations, spread across the globe
onto national and local scales, albeit unevenly and not necessarily implemented in the same way. In
this study, this perspective on transnationalization is above all visible in the analyses of social
protection and social inequalities presented in the sections on how migrants straddle the boundaries
of various social spaces connecting the global South and the global North (Part II, Chapters 4 to 6). It
also plays a role in the politics around the transnationalized social question, above all in the
discussion on the function of human rights discourses (Part III, Chapters 7 to 9).
Second, the term transnational refers to transnational social spaces, where the focus is on social
ties of migrants (and their collectives) and significant other agents, such as organizations and
communities. In short, this is a mobility perspective of the transnational. It is thus related to the first
perspective, the diffusion approach. However, it is mostly a perspective from below, focusing on
micro- and meso-scale phenomena. The concept refers to cross-border social spaces with dense,
continuous, and sustained transnational ties that concatenate into social structures. Transnational
spaces refer to relatively stable, lasting, and dense sets of ties reaching beyond and across the
borders of sovereign states. They consist of combinations of ties and their contents, positions in
networks and organizations, and networks or organizations that cut across the borders of at least two
national states. Social ties, the smallest elements in such spaces, refer not only to one locale but to
several. Transnational social spaces are dynamic social processes, and definitely not static notions of
ties and positions (Faist 2000: 197). Thus, transnational structures point to connectivity beyond
national containers and to the simultaneity of sociality in various locales. In particular,
transnationality as a heterogeneity matters, that is, the degree to which an actor entertains ties across
borders, which in turn may have implications for life chances and social inequalities. This view
emphasizes the importance of lateral linkages across the borders of national states in the form of
families, associations, and groups. Again, this understanding of transnationalization is important
above all in Part II of this volume when discussing migrants’ practices in matters of social protection
(Chapters 5 and 6), and in Part III with respect to diaspora (Chapter 9).
A third understanding of the transnational is a grounded view which does not conceive of the
transnational as a separate realm, a level set apart from the local, national, or regional. Instead, it
asks how the transnational is encapsulated or nested in whatever scale can be taken as a unit of
observation (and/or analysis). One specific version of this approach is sometimes applied to analyse
politics and policy-making in the European Union. The main idea is that various scales are nested
within each other—supranational, national, and regional or local (Faist 2001). Migration is a perfect
example of how newcomers, the ‘other’, are already part of ‘us’, visible at least upon arrival. Certain
human rights, for instance, are meant to apply right from the start. In this logic, human rights apply to
all, irrespective of residence, a statement which is not meant to be an empirical fact but a horizon
which can be appealed to. Whether or not such is the case is a matter of the outcome of political
contention. Here, this third view of transnationalization is above all prevalent in discussions of social
protection in Europe (Chapter 5) and in the analyses of the politics around social inequalities and
migration in immigration and emigration contexts (Chapters 8 and 9).
This third understanding of transnationalized processes has the advantage of considering the
transnational as an integral element of existing structures, such as institutions of national states or
local social structures, rather than as an external force. Generally, in the short period from the end of
the Cold War until the early 2000s, many social analysts expressed optimism that growing
interdependence in contemporary society would be highly propitious for the establishment of
solidarity across borders. This thought, grounded in Durkheim’s Division of Labour (1964a [1893]),
has been visible, for example, in ideas advocating transnational social policy (de Swaan 1994)—the
idea that OECD states should have an interest in providing basic social security to people in less
fortunate locations. However, events after 9/11 have led in a different direction.
The analyses presented here focus on transnational diffusion, transnational spaces, and
transnationalization within national states, mainly with reference to Europe and Germany. The
European Union constitutes a special context because various scales matter in a sort of nested politics
and policy-making, and because of the existence of sub-national (regional), national, and
supranational governance structures. As to non-state actors, they also operate on various scales.
Germany, in a transnational context, constitutes a crucial site for observing transnationalization and
inequalities because it has experienced migration from various parts of the world: Eastern Europe,
the Middle East, and also increasingly Africa. There is thus a diversity of regions of origin with
respect to Germany’s population. Within Europe, Germany has been a principal driver of migration
policies and social policies within the EU, although there is wide variation among the member states
with respect to policies and the politics of migration (Faist and Ette 2007). Moreover, Germany has
also played a crucial role in the recent enlargements of the EU during the first decade of the 2000s,
the financial/economic crisis since 2008 and the latest increase in refugee flows since 2015.
Nonetheless, the analysis also draws, when appropriate, on transnational spaces and ties involving
other countries in Europe and globally.
Finally, a note on terminology is in order. It is important to note some of the predicaments of the
choice of concepts such as global South and global North or immigration and emigration countries.
They are heuristically useful binaries which are used here for the sake of simplifying the discussion.
At the same time, they paper over important heterogeneities of countries, groups, and institutions
within the categories. Whenever possible, more fine-grained distinctions are made, such as the four
spheres of social protection which cut across the global South and the global North as well as
immigration and emigration countries (Chapter 4). What is more, notions such as global South and
global North are political distinctions which sometimes categorize inequalities before the actual
analysis. Here, the terms global North and global South do not merely refer to territories but to
socially constituted positions in politics, economy, and culture (de Sousa Santos 2014). Hence the
South is also an intrinsic part of the North in that it includes the marginalized, invisible, and often
excluded parts of the population in the latter. In turn, the South also includes (trans)national elites and
ascending and aspiring groups who dominate the politics in the global South.
This book focuses on South–North migration. This emphasis does not take into account a
substantial share of global migration, South–South migration, internal migration, and North–North
migration. The decision to focus on South–North migration is based on the expectation that global
inequalities and the transnationalized social question will become visible. Another problem is the
conflation of global South with emigration regions and the global North with immigration regions.
Such a choice does not assume that South to North migration is the norm. This has to be handled with
great care since we know that many countries in both parts of the world are emigration, transit, and
immigration states.
* * *
Following an exposition of the transnationalized social question in a comparative historical
perspective from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries (Chapter 2) and the nexus of cross-
border migration and inequalities (Chapter 3) in Part I of the book, Part II describes one of the key
responses to durable and categorical inequalities—efforts at social protection (Chapters 4 to 6). Part
III deals with the politics of how inequalities are perceived and dealt with politically (Chapters 7 to
9). Finally, Part IV offers an outlook in sketching the socio-natural question with respect to
environmental destruction and climate change (Chapter 10), and the role and contributions of social
scientists in public debates around the transnationalized social question (Chapter 11).
Chapter 2 explores whether exit has replaced voice as a dominant strategy to deal with the
unequal distribution of life chances across time from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary
period. It becomes clear that a simplistic interpretation in casting the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries as the time of voice with respect to working-class organization, and today as the
time of exit in the face of an ‘age of migration’, would be misleading. Instead, there are distinctive
combinations of exit and voice across time. Markedly, four differences between three periods—the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the post-Second World War period, and the phase since
the 1970s—can be discerned: first, the development of national welfare states as the main regulators
of social protection in response to political struggles around social inequalities and the implications
for social closure toward non-citizens; second, the gradual emergence of sophisticated state migration
control; third, the growing political relevance of heterogeneities such as religion, ethnicity, and
gender beyond class; and fourth, a lack of a coherent theory around the transnationalized social
question which would be able to mobilize politically and intellectually. Instead, we find a multitude
of theories and multiple new social movements.
Chapter 2 sets the stage in historical perspective, while Chapter 3 elaborates on the structural
framework in which cross-border migration is entangled with the creation and reproduction of social
inequalities—although, for migrants, exit is mostly a path to gaining some kind of social mobility.
This chapter portrays how cross-border migration is a visible reflection of manifold global
inequalities, political and economic alike. It seeks to answer two major questions. First, how do
social inequalities affect opportunities for cross-border migration for different socio-economic
groups? Second, conversely, how do the outcomes of migration affect social inequalities in global
patterns of distribution and in life chances in the countries of both emigration and immigration? Of
ultimate interest is whether migration buttresses the dominant forms of social stratification, or
whether it transforms the distribution of valued goods in a fundamental way. The results suggest that
cross-border migration constitutes a path to upward social mobility for migrants, and—at the same
time—that such processes tend to reinforce durable inequalities on a deeper level. As a consequence,
cross-border migration reflects the importance of location, residence, and membership in countries as
an important proxy for life chances.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 in Part II deal with a crucial response to conflicts around the social question
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—social protection, that is, social security to address risks
for health, old age, or employment emanating from the pursuit of a livelihood. This part brings
together aspects of social protection from a global perspective (Chapter 4), the European Union as a
transnationalized social space of social security (Chapter 5), and social protection in small
collectives, such as kinship groups (Chapter 6). Thus, the main issue is to secure social protection
after exit and upon entry—often combining elements provided by states, organizations, families, and
significant others across borders.
Examining social protection in the context of migration is particularly important because it links
the disparate, fragmented social spaces of unequal life chances and social protection across the
world. The provision of social protection, especially among migrants, often occurs across the borders
of national states. Chapter 4 therefore deals with how social protection has been organized across
borders with special consideration of migrants and their dependents. In order to understand the social
protection process, various realms of provision are considered together—state, market, civil society,
and family. Europe, and the European Union in particular, can be conceived as a transnational social
space, a social space even in the sense of community (cf. Deutsch et al. 1957), with a high degree of
transaction across borders of member states (Delhey 2004). Chapter 5 asks how efforts to provide
social protection for cross-border migrants in the European Union reinforce existing inequalities (e.g.
between regions or within households), and lead to new types of inequalities (e.g. stratification of
labour markets). Social protection in the EU falls predominantly under the purview of individual
member states; hence, frictions between different state-operated protection systems and social
protection in small groups are particularly apparent in the case of cross-border flows of people and
resources. The analysis examines in detail the general social mechanisms operative in cross-border
forms of social protection, in particular exclusion, opportunity hoarding, hierarchization, and
exploitation, and also more concrete mechanisms which are constructed bottom-up.
Social protection is an appropriate field for analysis because it is based on reciprocity and
sometimes solidarity between groups. In order to capture social protection among migrants and their
dependents in connection to non-migrants, social protection which is provided within family, kinship,
and friendship circles must be included in the analysis. Chapter 6 accordingly turns to a close
examination of social protection in small groups in three transnational social spaces, namely
Germany–Turkey, Germany–Poland, and Germany–Kazakhstan. It looks at how migrants organize
their social protection, taking into account the manifold state regulations, supranational frameworks,
and civil society organizations, as well as the migrants themselves and their significant others spread
across various state borders. It provides a context for understanding migrants’ social protection,
influenced by a variety of heterogeneities which intersect with transnationality.
Part III of the book moves from the social structural analysis of social inequalities (re)created in
migration processes and the role of social security to the politics of inequalities around social
protection in the contexts of migrant origin and destination (Chapters 7 to 9). These chapters revolve
around voice exerted by various powerful and weaker agents, but also the aspect of loyalty to groups
as imagined and transnational communities. The chapters engage in a close-up analysis of conflicts in
both immigration and emigration states, looking at transnational spaces spanning Europe and other
parts of the world (Chapter 7), Germany (Chapter 8), and various emigration countries across the
globe (Chapter 9). Here, the national state context is a central site of departure because it provides a
distinct and crucial frame for political debates, conflict, and compromise. There is a transnational
puzzle to be addressed in politics: while many inequalities may arise in the context of cross-border
transactions, much of the response is local and national. The analysis thus distinguishes between the
immigrant context and the emigrant context—in full awareness that many states, such as Turkey, are
both major emigration and immigration states, and also states of transit. Thus, Part III focuses on how
perceived inequalities involving migrants and native populations are called into question and how
they are legitimized. These processes constitute prime examples of how states and their public
spheres have become transnationalized.
Chapter 7 addresses the transnational architecture of migration control. The main idea is that the
transnationalized social question finds its mirror image in immigration and emigration contexts. While
it is the welfare state that promises protection from unfettered global economic competition in the
immigration states, development in emigration countries is typically thought to lead to increased
participation in the global economy and thus higher prosperity for all citizens. On the part of
immigration countries, migration control assumes a high priority, characterized by externalization and
remote control in areas of origin and transit. On the side of emigration countries, the migration–
development nexus takes centre stage—with the developmental (national) state in the global South
often working as a functional equivalent to the national welfare state in the global North. The agenda
is set by the immigration side by linking migration control to an exchange for development
cooperation.
In Chapter 8, focusing on Germany, politics runs along two major lines in immigration contexts—
economic and cultural divisions. Economic divisions are characterized by market liberalization in the
competition state vs. the de-commodification of the ‘fictitious commodity’ of labour (Polanyi 2001
[1944]) as part of the welfare paradox: economic openness toward capital transfer is in tension with
political closure toward migrants and granting them social rights. Here, radical market liberalization,
sometimes called neo-liberalism, refers mainly to the deregulation of markets in favour of capital
owners, lower taxes for entrepreneurs, and a scale-back of welfare state arrangements. It is migrants
as human capital vs. migrants as bearers of social rights. Viewed from a state perspective, it is the
(economic) competition state vs. the (national) welfare state, both of which have different functions.
The major contention in the cultural realm is a periodic clash between the rights revolution (both
human and cultural) vs. the mythos of national/cultural homogeneity. It finds expression in the liberal
paradox—the extension of human rights to migrants who reside in welfare states vs. the efforts to
control borders and cultural boundaries. Threat perceptions often lead to a securitization of migration
and migrants. In terms of the state, it is a juxtaposition of the multicultural state on the one hand and
the democratic/national (welfare) state on the other.
In emigration contexts, discussed in Chapter 9, the dichotomies in political debates are different.
The economic trench lines definitely still revolve around the notion of development, a staple concept
for politicians and policy-makers since the Second World War. In order to understand how emigration
states deal with emigration, return migration, remittances, and diaspora formation, we depart from the
notion of the developmental state. It had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. However, beginning in the
1980s, international organizations such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
have cherished and strengthened market mechanisms, civil society actors, and the local state in
carrying out development projects. It is thus a juxtaposition of the national development state vs. the
market–civil society–local state compact which helps to elucidate politics around cross-border
migration. With regard to cultural issues, the notion of diaspora reigns paramount. On the one hand, it
is diaspora formation—diaspora understood in a broad sense as communities of citizens living
abroad—that characterizes emigration. On the other hand, the diaspora is sometimes or quite often
involved in home-country politics, and is sometimes seen as a competitor or threat to nation-building
and the consolidation of political power.
Part IV opens up the politics around the transnationalized social question by exploring the socio-
natural question with the example of environmental destruction, climate change, and migration
(Chapter 10) and discussing the role of social scientists in prospects for transnational social and
mobility rights (Chapter 11). It thus marks two areas of central concern for future research and the
engagement of researchers in the public sphere. Exit through cross-border migration is one of several
ways in which people have adapted to both the slow onset and fast onset environmental changes of
the Anthropocene, a heuristic referring to the new epoch in which human practices have had
significant consequences for global ecosystems (Chapter 10). Ultimately, the protection or destruction
of human habitat pre-empts and precedes all other questions discussed in this book. In other words,
like the threat of nuclear war, the destruction of the ecological foundations of human habitat is
decisive for human life as such. So far, two generations of scholarship have discussed the climate
change–migration debate in a rather narrow framework, without considering in full that climate
change is mainly an add-on to large-scale environmental destruction. The first generation theorized
migration as a mechanistic response to climate change with the concept of ‘vulnerability’. The second
generation conceptualized climate-related migration as adaptation in human security by placing
agency at the core. But the focus on the ‘resilient migrant’ has occluded the effects of climate change
on different categories of people with respect to social inequalities, and scholars have not fully dealt
with the analogy between the exploitation of humans by humans and the exploitation of nature by
capitalism.
Chapter 11 raises the question of how social scientists might intervene in public debates on
inequalities and the transnationalized social question. Academic and public debates on social
inequalities and social protection often raise the question whether and in what ways social scientific
research may form a basis for rational political decisions and thus policy-making. The main thesis of
this chapter is that, while social science research indeed has implications for public policies, such a
question is ultimately misleading. Nevertheless, social scientific research may offer crucial
information for describing, understanding, and explaining social inequalities and social protection.
Yet the most important role of social science is not to give concrete policy advice but to offer
concepts and patterns of interpretations which can guide political debates in the public sphere. This
means that social scientific analysis should go beyond focusing on research–policy links, and bring
the social scientists’ role into the public sphere in a much more forceful way.

Notes
1. Throughout this volume, the terms social protection and social security are used synonymously.
2. The original German is Überflüssige Menschen, and this is the title of a 1926 silent film directed by Aleksandr Razumnyj.
3. The conceptualization of rights into three generations of rights assumes that one stage follows upon the other in a sequence. Here, no
such teleological claim is made. The distinction with respect to generations serves only as an analytical tool to distinguish sets of
rights relevant from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.
4. Here, the term national state is used instead of nation state in order to refer to the ideological character of sovereign states which
claim to have national unity (see also Connor 1978).
Part I
Approaching the Transnationalized Social Question

Part I sets the stage for the subsequent analysis in two ways. First, it places the contemporary
transnationalized social question in a historical perspective (Chapter 2), enabling a clearer
understanding of the characteristics of the twenty-first century with respect to important institutions
and public discourses not only relating to the production of inequalities but also the political
mobilization pertaining to inequalities in the global North. Specific areas covered include the
emergence and further development of the national welfare state, the concomitant expansion of
migration control, the discursive moves from class to cultural heterogeneities as categorizations
relevant to the politics of inequalities, and the changing role of theory guiding political action.
Second, based on this historical sketch, Part I systematically explores the nexus between migration
and inequalities in the context of both the global North and the global South (Chapter 3).
2

The Social Question Then and Now

From Voice to Exit?

On a global scale, distress and social instability today are reminiscent of the living conditions that
obtained through a large part of the nineteenth century in Europe. At that time the social question was
the central subject of volatile political conflicts between the ruling classes and working-class
movements. Are we now on the verge of a new social conflict, this time on a transnational scale,
characterized by manifold boundaries—such as those between capital and labour, North and South,
developed and underdeveloped or developing countries, or those in favour of increased globalization
against those advocating national solutions? The protests of globalization critics, for instance by
manifold social movement organizations at the World Social Forum over the past decade, certainly
cannot be overlooked (Carver and Bartelson 2011). A proliferation of political groupings and non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) rally across national borders in support of various campaigns
such as the environment, human rights, women’s issues, Christian, Hindu, or Islamic fundamentalism,
migration, and food sovereignty (Evans 2006), but there is also resistance to growing cultural
diversity and increasing mobility of goods, services, and persons across the borders of national
states.
Was voice the dominant strategy of the dissatisfied and those looking for a better life in the
nineteenth century, while exit constitutes the most viable strategy of the same category today? Three
aspects raise doubts about this proposition. First, when viewed globally, cross-border migration was
probably higher in the late nineteenth century than today (see Chapter 1). The late nineteenth century
was also characterized by a relatively high degree of working-class mobilization in rapidly
industrializing countries of what is nowadays called the global North. Therefore, it would be
premature to assume that exit and voice are zero-sum options and thus mutually exclusive (cf. Pedraza
2013). Second, as to the exit of labour, it is indeed possible, given sufficient resources. Yet entry is
highly controlled through rather restrictive immigration controls by national welfare states in the
global North and authoritarian states in the Arabian Gulf. This is also true of forced migrants. Third,
the current period is characterized more by the exit of capital than of workers. Actually, it was the
relative success of workers’ voice through unionization which has led to the relocation of capital,
often overseas, and the attack on the political influence of organized labour.
Nonetheless, the question about exit and voice is productive and leads to others: have we thus also
moved from exploitation of labour to issues of exclusion of immigrants from welfare-state support in
their new countries (non-membership)? And since location and state membership have gained
increasing importance for life chances from a global perspective, have the trench lines in political
mobilization been switched from class to culture, in other words, from redistribution to recognition?
In a nutshell, the answer is that exit has not replaced voice. In order to develop this answer to the
questions raised in more detail, we need to take a closer look at the distinctive patterns in the
relationships between migration, social inequalities, and politics in Europe since the late nineteenth
century to the present day, in four distinct categories.
First, the emergence and subsequent development of the national welfare state must be considered.
The welfare state needs to reconcile the logic of capital accumulation on the one hand, and
redistribution of resources through social entitlements to compensate the populations at risk on the
other. This situation results in social closure towards the outside as a prerequisite to internal
inclusion. In other words, equality of citizens and their inclusion in the welfare state is predicated
upon exclusion of non-members and a high level of global inequality.
Second, national states in the global North have successfully expanded and perfected effective
migration control since the First World War. More recently, remote control has been institutionalized
to a large extent in North and West Africa, and the Middle East—two major regions of origin of
migrants to Europe. This trend helps to circumvent the liberal paradox. This paradox refers to the
tension between autonomous state control of migration on the one hand, and observing the human
rights of asylum seekers and other migrants on the other. By securitizing cross-border migration
through remote control, the liberal paradox does not arise in the first place. Both the welfare state and
the security state clearly distinguish between members and non-members; they thus create and
reproduce the binary of inclusion and exclusion as the dominant logic. This logic also explains why,
despite the growing importance of location and citizenship, we do not observe a higher propensity for
migration. It also helps to account for the observation that labour is less mobile across borders than
capital.
Third, there has been a shift from class to culture in public debates and perception, implying
different sorts of major questions. Overall, the political mobilization around social inequalities—a
necessary condition to speak of the transnationalized social question—has moved from a focus on
redistribution to one which includes issues of recognition. This development dovetails with a strong
push towards market liberalization from the late twentieth century onwards which can be seen as a
backlash to redistribution. What we observe is that voice around class has been complemented by
voice around cultural heterogeneities, such as race, ethnicity, and religion, but also more general ones
such as gender. Even though migrants at first perceive themselves or are perceived primarily as
economic actors, they start to exert voice. What helped drive culturalization of heterogeneities is the
fact that market liberalization not only resulted in (labour) market deregulation but also increased
responsibility of individuals for their own fate and thus an emphasis on cultural heterogeneities. The
main claim here is not that the significance of class is decreasing and the significance of cultural
issues is increasing in political contention around the contemporary transnationalized social question.
Culture has been an element of contention around cross-border migration for the past 200 years.
However, since the 1960s, vertically constructed class struggles have been increasingly
complemented by horizontal issues, such as environment, gender, and migration (see also Hechter
2004). New social movements have also contributed to a heightened awareness of cultural
differences (d’Anjou and Van Male 1998).
Fourth, the old social question was characterized by a strong orientation towards socialist
thinking, broadly understood as the overcoming of actually existing capitalism. Because of a
multiplication of heterogeneities in addition to class there is also a wide variety of theoretical
orientations, ranging from feminist theory and ‘the multitude’ of agents pushing for democratization of
world society (Hardt and Negri 2000) through multiculturalism and diversity management to post-
nationalism and post-colonial approaches. These perspectives range from affirmation to criticism to a
rejection of the current world social order; they are more diverse than ever in that the primacy of
certain fields, such as the economic system or the political system, has been called into question.
Then and now the social question has several distinct elements: first, the perception of large-scale
inequalities between social groups—then workers and capitalists, now those in the global South vs.
those in the global North, or majorities and minorities within national societies; second, political
contention around inequalities—then through unions and socialist parties on the part of workers
against capitalists, now, for example, anti- and alter-globalists vs. market liberals; and, third,
institutionalized efforts at dealing with inequalities, such as—historically in large parts of Europe—
social rights within nationally bounded welfare states or, more recently, social standards meant to
apply worldwide, but also efforts to keep out cross-border migrants who are sometimes cast as a
security threat. Today’s transnationalized social question, like the old one, is about inequalities,
which in extreme cases constitute exclusion from participation and recognition. Inequalities refer to
unequal access, along the lines of groups or categories, to resources important for life chances in
fields such as education, work, or housing. Exclusion refers to processes which deny actors any
chance of taking part in education or work, or obtaining decent housing—for example, by way of
dispossessing farmers, a tendency observable mainly in rural Africa but also visible in Latin America
and parts of Europe.
The current social question is an issue akin to the conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisie in
the nineteenth century, and also involves fears of loss of power and income on the part of those who
are politically dominant and economically thriving. It is a problem born out of the importance of
location for one’s life chances, for the chances of one’s offspring, or for one’s reference groups, no
less than the earlier fear of Communist revolution was born out of differentials between social
classes within the same societies. Thus, this claim already points to discernible differences. In
contrast to the nineteenth century, the problem which is likely to dominate the present century is the
issue of uneven resource distribution and huge power asymmetries between countries, the market-
liberalist governance of economic processes, the continued over-extraction of resources with the
resulting environmental destruction, and concomitant mobilities of persons across national borders.
Also of relevance are responses ranging from diversity management, to grass-roots mobilization for
human rights, to right-wing populist and nationalist opposition to globalizing trends.
In a nutshell, cross-border migration is a strategic research site for the social question because of
the increased importance of location and membership for life chances. There are two main reasons
why cross-border migration is crucial for understanding today’s transnationalized social question; the
first emerging from general social transformation and the second from migration processes. First,
migration and migrants reflect a more general societal trend of a move from class to culture as a main
trench line in politics. This change has been visible, for example, in new social movements that have
tabled issues strongly connected to identity and cultural practices with respect to domains as diverse
as national self-determination, gender equality, religious freedom, and lifestyles. Also, migration and
its consequences frequently have served as a domain in which to discuss and practise the increasing
plurality of languages, religions, and ways of life in national societies (Modood 2007; Vertovec
2007). Second, voluntary migration in particular usually involves a transition from Homo
oeconomicus to Homo politicus, from class to cultural and identity issues. This means that there has
been an endogenous dynamic inherent in any cross-border migration process over the past 200 years.
At first, many migrants both perceive themselves and are perceived by others as mainly economic
actors or victims of violence. Labour migrants, for example, in the first phase of their stay abroad,
often single-mindedly pursue the goal of economic betterment for themselves and their families. It is
only in later phases that they organize as cultural and political actors and become involved in the
politics of the country of settlement (Chapter 1). Needless to say, this is somewhat different with
respect to political exiles who sometimes prioritize cultural and national issues right from the start.
Nonetheless, those migrants who start as economic actors later often become also socio-political and
moral actors in a more visible way (Chapter 8).

The Changing Social Question Over the Past 200 Years

Three periods can be distinguished with respect to the transnationalized social question: the first
modern globalization from the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War; relative
de-globalization after the conflict and embedded globalization after the Second World War; and the
second modern globalization since roughly the 1970s. This periodization is a heuristic device, meant
to indicate distinctive features of the transnationalized social question. The first period was
characterized by capitalist industrialization and revolutions in communications (e.g. telegraph) and
transportation (e.g. railroads and steamships). This growing global interdependence also created new
political constellations—it was the period of ‘the great acceleration’ (Bayly 2004) with respect to
industrialization, urbanization, and global trade. The second period was a time of relative economic
de-globalization, the expansion of national welfare states, and the institutionalization of strict
migration controls. Finally, since the 1970s we can speak of a second modern globalization. This
third period coincides with increased market liberalism as a renewed effort at de- and re-regulating
markets in favour of the owners of capital.
Four major shifting currents can be identified over the last 200 years. First, in most of the global
North, some form of national welfare state has been institutionalized, which expanded considerably
after the two world wars and which moderated social conflicts around (re)distribution quite
successfully in the first thirty years after the Second World War, the trentes glorieuses of embedding
national states in the global fold. While the welfare state in liberal democracies of the global North
has bounded social conflicts on a national scale, the dichotomy of internal and external has
sharpened, with the welfare state serving as the main mechanism of social closure towards the
outside: economic opening came in exchange for class compromise. Obviously, the inclusion of
citizens and other privileged categories (e.g. denizens) has come at the cost of excluding outsiders not
living in the territory, migrants with a legal status lesser than that of citizens, including those with an
irregular status living in the welfare state. This kind of location- and membership-based social
closure was a prerequisite for relatively open borders with respect to the economic exchange of
goods and capital. While the welfare state privileged class interests, other heterogeneities, such as
ethnicity and religion, were institutionalized in parallel. Multicultural politics, prominent since the
1970s and 1980s, have also taken a national form, meant to strengthen social cohesion in national
states (Kymlicka 1995). The focus on cultural issues has thus been advanced by multiculturalists who
seek to address growing societal diversity by advancing cultural rights for national minorities, with
lesser emphasis on migrants. There is another development related to globalization, politics, and
culture. Although there has been a transformation of the welfare state since the 1980s, due in large
part to market-liberal rollbacks, which have resulted in a gradual restriction of social rights and
benefits, those affected in the global North have not entered into open revolt or (re)turned to class
politics, but have engaged partly in a culturalized politics of fear or anxiety over the national, a sort
of authoritarian nationalist populism. While populist politics is an integral part of democratic
politics, its right-wing focus on cultural issues in migration has, among other features, spurred
exclusionist measures against selected categories of newcomers.
Second, the new social question is as transnational as the old one, exemplified in cross-border
migration. Not only has the national welfare state developed and bounded social rights but national
states as security states have turned into the main legitimate regulator of cross-border migration by
employing a changing mix of techniques of control which allow for restrictions and openings. Both
the welfare and the security element are held to be characteristics of modern states, induced by
processes of transnational diffusion (Gilardi 2012). Given the high global income disparities, we
would think that the rate of global migration should be higher than 3 per cent. This relatively low rate
of cross-border migration can also be partly attributed to the effect of the exclusivist features of
national welfare states.1 Restrictive migration control has been accompanied by a perception of
migration and migrants as a threat and has resulted in the securitization of control. In this way, the
solution of the national welfare state as a response to the social question of the first period has turned
into a problem exacerbating global inequalities outside the confines of advanced welfare.
Third, we are witnessing the increasing relevance of cultural differences in contemporary debates
around the transnationalized social question. For example, conflicts around cultural rights signify that
(in)equality issues are increasingly also framed not only as issues of material resource distribution
but as recognition questions. One consequence is an increasing significance of cultural differences but
not necessarily a decline of class as a heterogeneity, which matters for the (re)production of
inequalities and the struggles around these. Instead of culture replacing class as the main dividing line
in conflicts, class has been culturalized and perceived as a heterogeneity like others, such as religion,
gender, or ethnicity. Socially, cross-border migration has resulted in sustained transnational linkages,
such as social spaces of networks, organizations, and diaspora groupings. Politically, cross-border
migration has evolved as a visible sign of conflicts around cultural heterogeneities because it
increases the plurality of heterogeneities such as religion, language, or gender in immigration
countries—a process of transnationalization internal to national states. These features can be taken as
a core around which political mobilization for or against multiculturalism, diversity, and other
perspectives and issues has occurred.
Fourth, as a prerequisite for mobilization around today’s transnationalized social question, we
would expect a unified line of theory. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, socialist and
anarchist theorizing played a pivotal role. The mobilizing role of socialist theory for imagining a
worldly utopia in which, using Marx’s terms, the exploitation of humans by humans would disappear,
was crucial. Yet there is no longer any single and coherent set of theories guiding political
mobilization around the social question. In the twenty-first century, a plethora of approaches seems to
have taken hold ranging from socialist to post-modern and post-colonial accounts.
With respect to theorizing, there is an interesting parallel between the first and the third periods,
as in both phases broader issues of social transformation have been of main concern (Faist, Aksakal,
and Schmidt 2017). Karl Polanyi’s path-breaking argument concerning the movement towards free
markets and counter-movements speaks to the first two periods discussed (Polanyi 2001 [1944]).
Instead of focusing on exploitation in the context of capital accumulation, as Marx did, Polanyi’s
thinking revolves around markets and commodification of ultimately fictitious commodities—labour,
land, and money. The first period up to the First World War is characterized by a movement towards
what Polanyi described as the ‘myth of the free market’, demonstrating an interesting parallel to
today’s globalization, as both periods are characterized by a rapidly increasing market liberalization.
In the second period (from 1918 to the 1970s), the counter-movements gained traction, not only
towards de-commodification of labour but also in the form of authoritarian regimes such as National
Socialism and Stalinism. Whether we see a roughly comparable development since the 1970s with
the renewed implementation of market liberalism—such as structural adjustment programmes in the
global South and nowadays also austerity politics in the global North—which is counteracted by
grassroots social movements, is open to debate. What is well documented is that IMF debt
management from the 1980s onwards can be shown to have worsened the situation for the
unemployed and those in precarious working conditions (UNDP 2007/8).

Welfare States: From Exploitation to Exclusion

Welfare states in their original incarnation originated in the late nineteenth century as a response by
the ruling classes in Western Europe and beyond to the challenges posed by the social question. This
was a reaction both by the ruling classes to the ‘vagabond poor’ in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries (de Swaan 1988) and to the success of working-class, social-democratic, or
socialist political parties mobilizing for social rights and policies in bounded national welfare states
in the twentieth century (Korpi 1983). The proletariat in Europe, North America, and Australia
exerted its power through the ballot box and national elites responded by institutionalizing elements
of welfare states (e.g. Hennock 2007). In this way, the first generation of rights—civil and political—
served as a basis for the acquisition of a second generation of rights—social and economic—for
citizens. The result was that the containment of the social question rapidly progressed in national
welfare states (Flora and Heidenheimer 1981) in the second period discussed, from 1918 to the
1970s. Welfare state development addressed the risks emanating from participation in labour markets.
Subsequently, the very articulation of the national in the form of welfare states created insiders and
outsiders, privileged and under-privileged, expressed in distinctions such as citizens and aliens and
gradations in between. In this way the welfare state reinforced the exclusionary–inclusionary
tendencies of the national state as a territorial and democratic state. It should be pointed out that the
evolution and further development of national welfare states is not only a product of workers’ and
socialist movements pushing for more socio-economic participation. More generally, it can also be
seen as a seminal product of democratization (de Tocqueville 1988 [1835/40]), which, throughout the
nineteenth century and later, increased pressure upon states to intervene in social and economic
affairs in various guises: equality of outcome, equality of opportunity, equality of access, or freedom
to achieve various functionings (capabilities).
The debates and conflicts around the social question in the first modern globalization had a
transnational or even cosmopolitan ring to it: ‘Workers of the world unite’, demanded Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1978 [1848]). In the late nineteenth century the
transnational workers’ movement built increasingly formal linkages, such as universal symbols and
rituals (e.g. May Day), new methods of struggle, such as strikes, petitions, sabotage, and class-based
voting, all of which were underpinned by a critique of the capitalist system inspired by socialist,
communist, and anarchist and syndicalist thinking. Migrant workers were among those who spread
new organizational models and ideology around the globe in transnational social spaces, mostly in
Europe but less so elsewhere (Van der Linden 2008). Yet we need to keep in mind that at the time of
the Communist Manifesto the national state model of organizing politics in Europe and around the
world was not yet completely dominant. Moreover, there was no integrated world market to the extent
existing today.
In the second period, immediately after the First World War, some elements of national welfare
states expanded in a period of relative economic de-globalization. In Germany, for example, sickness
and disability insurance was complemented by unemployment insurance (1929) and later by
comprehensive retirement schemes (1957). Nowadays, the national welfare state model is the main
blueprint for public social protection, although with significant variations within the OECD world
and even more so in the global South where social security is embedded in developmentalist logic
(Chapter 4). And it is within this frame that the social question has been discussed in public debates.
The intellectual locus classicus for the national welfare state as an expression of embedded
globalization—akin to ‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie 1982)—is T. H. Marshall’s work on social
citizenship. Since the late nineteenth century, social rights in national states have been tied to
(national) citizenship status. In the tradition of Marshall (1992 [1949]), citizenship captures the
tensions between democracy and capitalism. The central focus is the inherent tension between the
idea of democracy, which is based on the notion of equal citizenship, and the social inequalities
brought about by capitalism. Marshall argues that the expansion of citizenship rights, and especially
the growth of social rights, over the course of the twentieth century enabled a historic compromise
between social classes. In his view, social rights and social policies stabilized welfare capitalism as
a legitimate system of social inequality on the national level in Western Europe during the middle of
the twentieth century. Social citizenship already stands for the compromise reached by decades of
struggles which rests on a sort of mild yet exclusive nationalism enabling solidarity and reciprocity
among citizens (cf. Miller 2016) but which also has taken the form of more rabid welfare chauvinism.
The way in which the social question has been institutionalized as a compromise along class lines
in the form of the welfare state is also important for understanding the contemporary handling of the
transnational by the national state. Political debates on social inequalities in public spheres are
mostly limited to national arenas. When considering cross-border phenomena such as migration and
their implications for social inequalities this becomes evident. Either the debates are on migrant
integration within particular national states, for example, on social inequalities between the native
and the immigrant population with respect to educational opportunities, or the debates are on
differences between the global North and the global South, for example, conceptualized and measured
along widely divergent life chances along national lines. A transnational perspective considers both
how cross-border phenomena are implicated in the generation and reproduction of social inequalities
within national states and how social processes such as sending remittances or providing social
protection cut across the territorial and legal boundaries of national states. Indeed, the two
perspectives or scales fit well together. After all, it is the ties cutting across national borders that
provoke debate and conflict in national states and international forums.
In the third period, the second modern globalization from the 1970s, the transnational meta-script
of market liberal ideas and policies experienced a new climax. In the global South this occurred
through market-liberalist structural adjustment policies which shifted the development agenda from
the national development state to local states, markets, and international organizations (Chapter 7). In
the global North, interdependence proceeded in the EU through increasingly liberalized markets but
no corresponding European welfare state, hence conflicts have emerged around issues such as
workers posted from one member state to another (Chapter 5). While it is true that there are incipient
efforts to institutionalize social protection across borders, protection remains weakly institutionalized
on the supranational level and the national state has the power to impose fundamental categories of
authoritative classification and regulation of international migration. On the one hand, we see
fledgling efforts to institutionalize cross-border social protection to address inequalities in the form
of social and labour standards, and even elements of a supranational welfare regime in the EU. In
both cases it is state policies that provide the resources that migrants may use to cross borders and to
pursue their livelihood projects abroad. Migrants are cast as engaged in financial remittances and
skills transfer which, in overly optimistic scenarios, is perceived as a win-win-win situation for
emigration states, immigration states, and migrants and their families. On the other hand, national
welfare states in Europe can, for example, be cast as enabling the social protection of large parts of
the full members among the resident population at the expense of those who are not admitted or
covered—for instance by way of immigration control (e.g. Brochmann and Hammar 1999). Inclusion
of insider citizens and exclusion of outsider aliens, especially those who have not reached the
territory of the welfare state, are instances of ‘social closure’ (Weber 1968 [1922]: 26)—in this case
enabled by the symbolic power (i.e. violence) of states (Bourdieu 1998a: 63). These exclusionary
mechanisms validate and legitimize classifications between citizens and aliens, insiders and
outsiders. We also need to remember that a stronger institutionalization of social protection across the
EU would not only more purposefully include migrants who are citizens of EU member states but
would also extend national borders to the EU borders. The frontiers of closure and its associated
forms of communal and associative relations would shift from the national to the supranational level.
The legitimization of social closure is straightforward: without some sort of exclusion which
sustains the importance of citizenship and location, certain institutions in national welfare states such
as collective bargaining between employers and unions would tend to erode. After all, given an
unlimited supply of labour, employers would feel no need to negotiate terms and conditions of work
with labour representatives. In fact, this has happened on a small scale in the construction sector in
some European countries such as Germany, with employers opting out of their associations since the
early 1990s when contracting companies and labour from abroad became more easily available
(Faist 1997).
Overall, today’s transnationalized social question poses severe challenges to the welfare state
model. In Europe, North America, and Australia, the solution to the old social question was
traditionally linked with the development of social rights (Flora 1986) and, with these, citizenship
status. Taking this solution to a global scale is more of a normative utopian idea. There is no feasible
concept of citizenship with the postulate of equal political freedom and equal political rights in any
kind of global community, although there is a tendency towards an establishment of social standards
in loose association with human rights.
Research so far has addressed the notion of a continuous extension of social rights ranging from
the national to the regional and ultimately the global level in a concentric fashion. It is a common
assumption that as their range expands, the generalized reciprocity and diffuse forms of solidarity
observable in EU welfare states gradually become weaker. At a global level a weak form of
solidarity is conceivable at best, say, in the form of the universal recognition of human rights and their
exhortation by UN organizations. The larger the group of persons involved becomes, the more
general, the less specific, the slighter an awareness of a sense of obligation and the weaker the degree
of its institutionalization becomes (see Beckert et al. 2004).
 While contention and claims-making for social rights in the nineteenth century were often
portrayed as the struggle of an international working-class movement, few international institutions
existed, and practically none dealing with social protection. After the Second World War, UN
organizations began to consider social rights in conjunction with basic rights and political and civil
rights. Meanwhile, some international organizations no longer discuss social security and social
rights merely as a factor contributing to economic development, but as intrinsic rights. For instance, in
an Annual Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP 2005a), explicit reference
is made to the General Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights (1966),2 and even the rights of citizens to a social contract on the national
state level: every person ‘is entitled to realization, through national effort, and international
cooperation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic,
social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality’.
The Civil and Social Covenants of the UN, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and various
regional declarations emphasize the universality of human rights and citizens’ rights (Brysk and Shafir
2004). They are universal in the sense that, for instance, all member states of the UN are signatories
of the International Covenant on Social and Economic Rights, that is, the Social Covenant. The
essential social rights laid down in Articles 22–7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(1948; preceded by the Atlantic Charter of 1941) are the fundamental right to school education, the
right to work and to join or form a trade union, the right to a basic or minimum income, food, clothing,
housing, medical care, and social security.3 These international conventions through UN organizations
have strengthened the ability of NGOs operating across borders to intervene against the national state
from below by allowing appeals to these bodies from minorities.
New social and labour norms are not necessarily identical with national social rights, but they
must be implemented at the national level in order to take effect. In other words, they need to diffuse
into national welfare systems to take hold. Yet the prospects for international social standards to turn
into hard law are dim (with the possible exception of the EU; see Chapter 4). The main difference
between social rights and social standards is that the latter are not enforceable by persons through the
legal system. The transnational regulation of employment and social standards comprises
international regimes such as the International Labour Organization (ILO), social clauses in trade
agreements, public codes of conduct, such as the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Companies
(OECD 2012) and the UN Global Compact (2017); but it also includes private transnational
regulatory forms such as codes of conduct for specific businesses, international framework
agreements, or social labels (Chapter 4). For example, in the late 1990s, as part of this human rights
strategy, the International Labour Conference of the ILO passed a Declaration on Fundamental
Principles and Rights at Work, and selected a small number of internationally recognized social
standards that lay claim to universal validity as human rights independently of whether they are
ratified as ILO conventions or not (ILO 1998).4 With respect to such social standards, two strands of
development can be observed, one of which builds on human rights as a point of reference, as just
mentioned, and the other on voluntary self-regulation by corporate actors. In the second strand, it is no
longer rights that are the focus of interest, but voluntary obligations that can be used as a means to
avoid binding regulations. Overall, the shifting of justifications for social norms from social rights to
more general human rights and above all voluntary self-regulatory measures do not lead one to expect
the establishment of sanctionable global social norms simply through diffusion of standards.
Transcending the national welfare state to implement social rights on a transnational scale is not
the only challenge involved. Cross-border migration also signals serious implications for the
functioning of national welfare states. European national welfare states consolidated after the Second
World War as regulatory and redistributive systems. As such, they were built to address class
differences and institutionalized such differences, such as the interplay of employer associations,
labour unions, and states in regulating labour markets. Yet national welfare states were not built to
deal with issues of lifestyle and cultural differences. Cultural issues cannot simply be solved by
redistributive measures although the latter remain an essential part of any welfare state intervention.
Issues of recognition follow logics different from redistribution (Fraser 2000).

Migration Control: Securitization vs. Human Rights

Looking at the rates of cross-border mobility across the three periods, in Europe—but also in Asia
and in Central Asia—they were at least as high in the first period as they are now in the third period.
Cross-border labour mobility in the nineteenth century in Europe was probably at an even higher
level than nowadays (Strikewerda 1997). Migration rates in this first phase were comparatively high
compared to the second period, particularly from the 1920s to the 1940s. Some European countries
experienced out-migration flows as high as 50 per cent of the national population, as in the case of the
British Isles, or one-third of it, as in the case of Italy—to the point of sparking debates as to the rights
of states to restrict emigration.
Income inequality between poor and rich countries has increased since the beginning of the 1800s.
Nonetheless, cross-border mobility was even higher during the long nineteenth century when
compared to the period after the Second World War (Hoerder 2003). Between 1815 and 1914 at least
eighty-two million people crossed borders as more or less voluntary migrants. Annually, this
amounted to 660 migrants per one million persons. Between 1945 and 1980 this figure was only 215
migrants per one million persons annually (Amsden 2001: 21). Within Europe these rates were
similar: Europe has been part of some of the densest migration systems on the planet, such as the
Atlantic system in the nineteenth century and an Eastern–Western European system in the late
twentieth. Since 1980 the number of migrants has increased somewhat. Still, relative to world
population, the share of cross-border migrants has not changed dramatically. In 1960, about 2.1 per
cent of the world’s population were migrants, and in 2015 about 3.2 per cent (UN 2016b). Also,
migration across the borders of national states from poorer to richer countries has not diminished this
gap—perhaps also because the rate of international migration has probably never exceeded 3 to 4 per
cent of the world’s population over the past 200 years. This is also true for Europe. Indeed, it should
be noted that immobility rather than mobility is a social fact with respect to cross-border migration
(Hammar et al. 1997). Third, looking at the growth of migrant stock, cross-border migration has
increased steadily but slowly in absolute numbers since the 1960s, and both the number and the
percentage of migrants and refugees in most rich countries seem set for further increase. In short,
rising world inequality becomes a driver for migration, and the latter—from an economic point of
view—holds the promise of providing a quick path to overcoming the gap between wealth and
poverty. Yet, migration is not the only response to global asymmetries: transfer of jobs is another.
Growing income disparities between nations over time have in turn generated strong incentives (e.g.
drastically lower wages in economically poorer countries) for outsourcing skilled and unskilled jobs
to peripheral countries (Fröbel, Heinrichs, and Kreye 1980), which tends to overcome twentieth-
century constraints on labour supply.
 States have always tried to constrain the movement of people and thus exert social closure: walls
were built by early Chinese states to keep out raiders, and by Europe’s medieval cities as a means to
police access. In 1648, the treaties of Westphalia, which brought an end to the Thirty Years War in
central Europe, established the principle that a state has sovereignty over a particular territory. The
drawing of borders is one way states answer a perennial question, namely, how to determine who has
access to resources and who belongs. These aspects refer to associative and communal relationships
around which national states are built. In the nineteenth century states sought to control the movement
of the poor in order to determine which unit was responsible for poor relief. Just like taking a role in
providing social protection, the evolution of migration control was a hallmark of the national state
after the First World War in Europe, North America, and Australia (Torpey 2000). Until the nineteenth
century, restrictions on movement were largely exercised within a state’s territory—through serfdom,
slavery, or poor laws—rather than between states. In the twentieth century, as a response to the
wartime and post-First World War cross-border migrations, international borders were strengthened
through a system of passports and visas. Also, very importantly, the significant expansion of welfare
states in the second period discussed, specifically following the two World Wars called for tighter
migration control. States have thus taken over the regulation of legitimate border-crossing. Today,
while the right to move within a state is enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, the movement of people between states and entry are tightly controlled (Wihtol de Wenden
2016b). The implications are clear: in the nineteenth century, it was possible for the poor of Europe
to migrate to settler colonies in America and elsewhere, but for today’s potential cross-border
movers originating in the global South the options are more limited—at a time when location and
marketable occupational skills matter even more than before for life chances. The emigration states of
the nineteenth century in Europe could, so to speak, export unemployment and poverty to the New
World, whereas most countries in the global South cannot, at least not to a significant degree.
In the first period, from the 1880s to 1914, immigration regulations across Europe were relatively
tolerant. Beyond Europe, this period experienced two major cross-border migratory streams. One
went from Europe mainly to North and South America: between 1845 and 1945 around fifty-five
million to fifty-eight million migrants travelled this route, of which a sizeable number returned. The
other stream went from China and India to other parts of Asia, and to Eastern and Southern Africa: in
the same time period about nineteen million people left China and about twenty-nine million
emigrated from India. Most of the second stream returned home once their contracts had ended
(Osterhammel 2009: 249–52).
An important caveat needs to be added. It would be wrong to assume that in the long nineteenth
century there was no migration regulation. Nonetheless, control was much less comprehensive than in
the second and third periods of cross-border migration. Furthermore, throughout much of the
nineteenth century, in Europe, migration controls not only inside state borders but across them focused
on those migrants who were potential beneficiaries of poor relief. For example, German states before
unification in 1871 monitored migrants in an effort to limit the burdens of providing for the vagrant
poor. They demanded that worker migrants carry identification papers from their community of origin,
guaranteeing that they were entitled to poor relief there (Reidegeld 1998).
During the second period, large-scale warfare disrupted these movements and more voluntary
forms of labour migration declined sharply, at least between the First and Second World Wars. The
decline was caused by, for example, the economic depression of the 1930s, stricter exit controls by
states such as the newly formed USSR immediately following the Great War, and increased entry
controls. In contrast to period one, the cross-border migrant rather than the internal migrant came to
symbolize the object of control. Immigration rules tightened in European and North American welfare
states, always with the claimed intention of protecting domestic workers from foreign competition.
This was also the phase of the social-democratic expansion of welfare states, and a time when many
North and West European welfare states introduced tighter labour market regulations and protective
measures, such as unemployment insurance. Mechanisms of institutionalized selective exclusion had a
direct impact on trends in inequality, helping reduce inequality within countries, while restricting
migration and thereby enhancing inequality between countries. Thus, the decline in inequality
experienced in several wealthy countries earlier in the twentieth century was to a large extent the
consequence of the introduction of wage-setting institutions across immigration countries that in effect
limited competition in their labour markets (Hatton and Williamson 2005). In Germany, for example,
the period after the First World War was characteristic in this respect (Dohse 1981). True, much of
the literature emphasizes the importance of macro-economic trends which enhanced the demand for
unskilled labour and thereby had a dampening effect on wage differentials, unionization, or
favourable state policies. Yet the introduction of restrictive international migration policies was the
sine qua non for the operation and eventual effectiveness of each of these measures. This meant that
the pendulum of ‘double movement’ was pushed back in the second period toward the principle of
social protection and away from the myth of the self-regulating market which had dominated the first
period, at least initially (Polanyi 2001 [1944]: 138).
Toward the end of the second period, immigration proceeded in Western liberal states, as labour
recruitment in the form of ‘guest workers’ and persons from former colonies and the European
periphery prevailed. In this phase the unintended consequences of restrictions placed by national
welfare states upon migrants became visible. This was so especially in light of the fact that national
states in the global North—liberal democracies in particular—not only offered social rights but also
frequently began to package certain entitlements as human rights. This is a typical instance of
encapsulated or internal transnationalization. A case in point was the recruitment of guest workers in
Germany and other north-west European countries in the 1960s. Although this category was rather
strictly controlled with respect to admission to the territory and to work, countries such as Germany
found themselves compelled to acknowledge the right to residence and to family reunification. This
process, spurred by an end to recruitment in 1973, led to the permanent settlement of a part of this
mobile population, and found its expression in the ‘Indian Case’ (1978) of the Federal Constitutional
Court (Triadafilopoulos 2012: 122). On the whole, the late 1940s to the early 1970s can be seen as a
distinct phase within the second period. Again, social protection expanded in this phase of the
Keynesian welfare state.
The third period of the social question can be subdivided into two. In the 1980s, migration
restriction reigned supreme. More recently, however, restrictionist policies have continued but with
more openings mostly for the so-called highly skilled. As can be seen in systematic analyses across
OECD immigration states, their admission policies have favoured highly qualified workers, based on
human capital considerations and underlying assumptions about this category of persons being
politically liberal—an indication that class-based skills selection is connected to assumptions about
cultural desirability. In contrast, regulations concerning low-skilled workers have become stricter
over time, reflecting the trend that it is legitimate to simplify access, admission, and membership for
highly skilled workers and those making capital investments. Indeed, it has become simpler for them
to gain access, and there are fewer rules, whereas the stipulations concerning those categorized as
low-qualified workers have become more numerous and complicated (Beine et al. 2016).
Governments seek to justify unequal treatment by referring to the contribution individual workers are
expected to make to increased economic productivity and the alleged propensity for integration into
the immigration society (Bauder 2006). The seminal change in migration control is moving from a
decline in selection by ethnic or national origin to more class-based selection.
Nonetheless, despite the dominance of restrictionist policies, a growing importance of human
rights can be observed since the late 1970s—not at the point of entry with respect to border control
but with respect to settlement. The increasing discursive emphasis on human rights can be seen in
phenomena such as new social movements. These are ‘coded in categories taken from the movements’
issues, such as gender, age, locality etc., or, in the case of environmental and pacifist movements, the
human race as a whole’ (Offe 1985: 131). The second part of the citation refers to universalist values
which include human rights. In the field of migration, human rights have found prominent expression
in considerations providing rights such as access to health care and education. The point of departure
is that permanent residents may have access to virtually all social rights, yet be barred from the right
to vote because they are not de jure citizens, that is, citizens in the full legal sense. One branch of the
discussion concerns the concept of post-national citizenship, which is particularly salient for the EU
and its national member states. This concept emphasizes the increasing relevance of genuinely inter-
and supra-state policies and rights. In general, post-nationalists claim that human rights have come
closer to citizens’ rights. In their view, liberal-democratic states have come to centre official policies
around the human rights of persons, irrespective of their citizenship (Soysal 1994). Interstate human
rights discourses and supra-state institutions such as the EU have led states to grant rights to certain
groups who thereby do not become citizens (yet), but denizens—immigrants holding permanent
residence status, and having access to virtually all civil and social rights. To some extent, the
emergence of denizenship counteracted one of the main trends of national state citizenship, which
privileged the binary opposition of citizen vs. alien, in contrast to the complex relationships between
individuals and polities in ancien régime societies. Denizenship implies that, increasingly, aliens
acquire rights that have formerly been the prerogatives of citizens (Hammar 1990). These categories
of people include permanent residents in the member states of the EU, that is, citizens of third states
(extracommunitari), who hold the citizenship of a non-EU country. This means that supranational
institutions such as the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have developed common rights for all
residents. For this reason, there are few differences today in social rights for denizens and citizens of
EU member states, social rights being lodged in human rights. Nevertheless, as the post-national focus
turns to the divergence between rights and identity, not on democracy, we need to analyse how human
rights have become an integral part of the politics around migration and inequalities (Chapters 8 and
9).
The importance of human rights for framing and articulating social conflicts and conflicts around
social inequalities has increased and is a typical process of transnational diffusion. For example,
international organizations such as the ILO tend to emphasize social rights as human rights. Still, there
are implicit tensions between various interpretations of human and social rights. Take, for example,
the EU and the European Council. On a supra- and international scale, human rights have emerged as
a dominant form of rights tied mainly to looser structures which are not ‘dense’ democracies, while
social rights are firmly tied to national welfare states. Overall, (global) human rights are emphasized
more by proponents of liberal market expansion, while (national) social rights are prioritized by
protectors of the welfare state (Streeck 2017).
All in all, the pendulum of migration control has been swinging back and forth between tolerant
and open phases on the one hand (the late nineteenth century; post-Second World War until the 1970s)
and restrictive periods on the other (the interwar period; since the 1970s/80s). Restrictionist or even
exclusionist policies and politics against migrants have changed over the three periods. In the first
period of the nineteenth century, opposition was directed against those migrants considered unfree
and contract labour. This applied to groups such as Indian immigrants in South Africa, Mexican
migrants in the United States, and Chinese sojourners in much of Southeast Asia and the United States.
Much of the politics portrayed contract labourers as having inferior racial characteristics (Foner and
Frederickson 2004). Class-based exclusion also mattered, as evidenced by sanitary control. For
example, on ships bound for the USA only steerage passengers were inspected as a matter of routine
in port cities such as Hamburg and Bremen; first- and second-class passengers could bypass these
procedures (Lüthi 2013). In the third period, most reservations have been expressed and implemented
through policies targeting undocumented migrants and allegedly undeserving asylum seekers. In this
period, instruments of ‘remote control’ (Zolberg 2006) have been intensified, ranging from visa
schemes in consulates to cooperation between police forces in countries of origin, such as the
involvement of the Spanish Guardia Civil in migration control in Senegal (Basaran 2011). This is the
period in which cross-border migrants have increasingly been perceived as a security risk, not only
to state security as such but also to welfare state security.
These considerations suggest that the emergence of national states, and national states as welfare
states, and the advent of immigration regulation went hand in hand. The new social question is visible
not only in explicit cross-border movements of people. Those who stay relatively immobile are
affected by what is called globalization, and above all by the impact on their lives of the decisions of
companies and the responses of states to their predicaments, such as the transformations of welfare
states into activating states which demand ever more flexibility of the workforce (Kvist 2000). Seen
through a transnational lens the new social question is thus not simply one in which forces and objects
from the ‘outside’ make their way ‘inside’ existing arrangements. What is outside and what is inside
national states has become ever more blurred in regions such as Europe, manifested most obviously
in the EU. The social transformation we are experiencing is part and parcel of these fundamental
changes.
In light of the perception of such interdependencies, however, a linear development from national
to supranational or even global regimes of migration management cannot be observed. And even the
modest steps toward such global regulation, such as the elevation of the intergovernmental
International Organization for Migration (IOM) to an organization associated with the UN, do not
necessarily suggest that social inequalities between countries of origin and destination, between
migrants and non-migrants, between migrants and native populations, are being addressed at a policy
level. In the contemporary period, demands for a global regime with respect to migration have been at
least as prevalent as those for social standards in employment. What the fields of migration and social
protection have in common is that national states consider these as their prerogatives, and are much
less inclined to cede authority to inter- and/or supranational institutions than they are in fields such as
trade or capital movements.
However, it is far from clear that a coherent global system of migration governance would
improve the situation of potential migrants and refugees. The implications for social inequalities all
depend on who benefits from which rules. It is not the absence of global migration and refugee
governance but the already existing rules which create inequalities between categories of movers, not
to mention those forced to remain immobile because of elementary destitution as a form of ‘structural
violence’ which ‘shows up as unequal power and consequently unequal life chances’ (Galtung 1969).
Akin to transnational social standards, international regulations of cross-border migration expose a
tension between efforts at global or supranational regulation on the one hand and national
prerogatives on the other.
On the one hand, cross-border migration definitely has global relevance and implications. Most
national states have either significant inflows of foreign citizens or outflows of their own citizens, or
both. Still other countries are mainly transit countries. And many emigration countries have
substantial numbers of emigrant citizens or former citizens in more than one or two foreign states. It
stands to reason that the regulation of such processes on a regional or even global level could benefit
all actors concerned, states, migrants, and migration brokers alike. Initiatives such as the Global
Commission on International Migration (GCIM 2005) or the Berne Initiative (S. Martin 2014) are
based on this idea. Issues of admission, recruitment, and return concern a sort of collective good.
This good is an order which guarantees that none of the parties involved suffers from undue costs,
such as brain drain and loss of a skilled workforce in emigration states, threat to welfare states in
immigration states, and the exploitation and denial of human rights for migrants. In the EU, there have
been efforts to ensure contributions to this collective good within the realm of member states;
although there is no common labour immigration policy (only emerging elements) there are,
nonetheless, fledgling elements of a common asylum policy. For example, the Dublin Convention
stipulates that the country of first entry is responsible for the asylum procedure.5 It should be taken
into account, however, that the flows of forced migration in 2015–16 witnessed the breakdown of the
Dublin mechanism and the unwillingness of a majority of member states to share in the distribution of
refugees.
On the other hand, while elements of global and regional governance exist in emerging forms,
emigration and immigration are issues of national sovereignty and, politically, the national arena
reigns supreme. National sovereignty is checked, particularly so in the case of emigration and return
to one’s country of citizenship, which are human rights, and also with respect to human rights
obligations derived from international conventions and national law. Nevertheless, it is the national
arena which is central to understanding the contentious political dynamics of the transnationalized
social question. The international regulation of the issue area is decisive here. While there is no
global political regime in the realm of labour, there is a partial one in the realm of refugees, namely
the Geneva Convention of 1951 and subsequent amendments and additions.
In sum, since the rise of the national state attempts have been made to quarantine the non-national
and in particular the transnational in the field of migration. As a matter of fact, the very existence and
emergence of national states is predicated upon their successful reining in of the transnational—here
widely defined as sustained and durable cross-border transactions of persons, groups, and
organizations. Controlling and making use of the transnational have been perennial tasks of national
states—as evidenced in, for example, the increased efforts of emigration states to reconnect to
(former) citizens abroad by way of diaspora policies (Chapter 9). In whatever way, the national state
model implies a division between ‘us’ (the citizens) and the ‘other’ (those who are outside or have
crossed the borders of the national state to reside within its perimeters). This is not to forget that there
may be functional equivalents to international borders and institutional boundaries inside the borders
of national states—for example, the Chinese hukou system (Chang and Zhang 1999).

The Increasing Relevance of Cultural Heterogeneities

At first glance it seems that while in the nineteenth and throughout much of the twentieth centuries
mainly one type of social actor from below—the working class—stood at the centre of struggles
around social equality in Europe and North America (Katznelson and Zolberg 1986), the situation
with respect to politicized heterogeneities is much more complex nowadays. Some would even claim
that culture has superseded class in the main trench lines of political conflicts (Hechter 2004),
although the manifold struggles around heterogeneities such as gender and ethnicity in the first period
under examination should not be forgotten.
As analyses of collective contention indicate, there is a broad variety of actors engaged in claims-
making around social rights (Pichardo 1997). The social question of the nineteenth century revolved
around class, congealed in the conflict between capital and labour and collective groupings referred
to as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In the nineteenth century the conflict between capital and
labour at times subsumed many other political struggles. This picture seems to stand in contrast to the
‘new social movements’ of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which, first, cultural
differences along race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and religion seem to have gained in
prominence as axes around which claims are made (Kivisto 2002). One may argue that conflicts are
defined not over material redistribution but over cultural reproduction and social cohesion (Touraine
1985). Multiculturalism and the growing importance of cultural rights are an expression of this
development. Second, human rights have entered the scene increasingly since the late 1970s when it
comes to evaluating social orders as legitimate or illegitimate (Moyn 2010). This tendency has found
expression in post-nationalist theories which have shifted the emphasis from civil, political, social,
and cultural rights as the rights of full members of national states to human rights as a basis for
legitimizing the former kinds of rights in world society organized politically in national states.
It seems that the welfare state has been a class compromise with respect to issues of redistribution
of material resources—always in tension with the requisite that national states also ensure capitalist
accumulation (Offe 1972). In the meantime quite a few analysts have maintained that the working
class in particular has effectively lost political power since the late 1970s (Pinto and Beckfield
2011), changing the precarious balance of class-based compromise in welfare states. Also, some
authors have maintained that the welfare state itself has contributed to the demise of collective
formations around class and contributed to risks allocated to the individual—processes of
individualization (e.g. Giddens 1991).
A striking feature, largely absent from this discussion, is that the social question has moved from
politics around a political subject conceiving itself as a (future) majority—the working class—to
multiple minorities. From the point of view of minorities, the welfare state has not lived up to the
goals of the French revolution: liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Political democracy and the welfare
state have referred to equality among market participants and, increasingly throughout the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, the equality of citizens. In the words of Aimé Césaire who, along with
Leopold Senghor, was a spiritus rector of the Négritude movement in the Francophone world, it is
recognition that has been missing:
Liberté, égalité, fraternité, prônez toujours ces valeurs, mais tôt ou tard, vous verrez apparaître le problème de l’identité. Où est la
fraternité? Pourquoi ne l’a-t-on jamais connue? Précisément parce que la France n’a jamais compris le problème de l’identité. Si
toi, tu es un homme avec des droits avec tout le respect qu’on te doit, et bien moi aussi, je suis un homme, moi aussi j’ai des droits.
Respecte-moi. A ce moment-là, nous sommes frères. Embrassons-nous. Voici la fraternité.
(Césaire 2005: 37)6

Where culturalization and cultural rights are concerned, therefore, it is important not to exaggerate
differences across the three periods under analysis. Although processes such as individualization
have contributed to culturalization especially in period three and are thus distinctive, the processes
advancing culturalization of groups as a consequence of migration can clearly be discerned in all
three periods. Cross-border migrations in the nineteenth century were indeed accompanied by fervent
debates and political conflicts around cultural heterogeneities. One has only to think of Chinese
exclusion on racist grounds in white settler colonies, effected through legislation starting in the early
1880s. It was pushed by organized labour (Mink 1986). The Chinese immigrants were cast as unfree
labour, standing in direct contradiction to the frontier spirit as a dominant nationalizing ideology. It
should not be forgotten that this charge reflected the history of those who considered themselves free:
Atlantic migration to the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was associated with
slavery but also characterized by unfree and indentured labour (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000).
Exclusionary immigration policies were also grounded on revitalized religious stereotypes, such as
anti-Semitic tropes against Jews from Eastern Europe (Ostjuden) in Germany but also the United
States. For example, between 1885 and 1914, Germany expelled thousands of Jews to Russia
(Brinkmann 2012). Moreover, even those immigrants admitted were often held to be racially inferior:
immigrants from Southern Europe in the United States, for example, were considered a darker race
(Perry 2016: 54).
Cultural heterogeneities as markers of boundaries figured prominently in the cases of both Chinese
migrants to the USA (Saxton 1971) and Polish migrants to the German Reich (Nichtweiß 1959) in the
late nineteenth century. Also, as Max Weber’s inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg suggests,
nationalist rationalizations of exclusion were abundant (Weber 1988 [1895]). These last examples
suggest that cultural issues are often tied to more general cultural fault lines. An illustrative case
concerns Polish migrants in the Ruhr area in Germany who were considered dangerous socio-cultural
actors. As political actors they were closely tied to the Polish Catholic Church, a main target of
Bismarck’s Kulturkampf (culture war). And although workers’ movement solidarity was high in the
late nineteenth century compared to the twenty-first, we are able to discern a clear gap between an
internationalist rhetoric and a national(ist) and racist reality. Class struggle was thwarted, as the First
World War suggests, by nationalism, which also included large parts of the working class
(Hobsbawm 1991). Another division went along race and racism: for example, in the United States
the labour movement at the time was split between those pushing for white supremacy and more
internationalist factions (Goldfield 1997). The internationalist faction fought against overseas
imperialism. The late nineteenth century, an era of national state formation and imperialism, saw the
unprecedented assertion of European and North American national states worldwide.
In the second period, immediately after the Great War, the masses of workers and the populace
were drawn further into nationalist ideology. Overall, the opportunities for internationalist
movements declined (Munck 1988). Workers’ movements were repressed and a strict passport regime
introduced in Europe. On the transnational level, the ILO, founded in 1919, was a tripartite body—
unions, employers, states—and not a workers’ international. Often, workers’ organizations fought for
improving collective bargaining and extending formal social protection in the national frame, and did
not pursue the constitution of cross-border institutional norms. The trend toward national class
compromise enabled rising real wages and welfare reforms.
In addition to the fact that conflicts coalesced around culture also in the first time period under
scrutiny, we need to consider that the second half of this phase, roughly the 1950s and 1960s, was a
period of relatively high—unusually high, one may venture—cultural homogeneity in many
immigration countries of the global North. In the USA, for example, this involved stark immigration
restrictions implemented in the early 1920s, resulting in a drop in migration. In Europe, there were
massive movements of forced migrants in the aftermath of the First World War but also strong
homogenizing tendencies. All of this ensured that processes of collective identification as well as
collective organization within Europe tended to occur along the lines of class interests and class
conflict (Goldmann, Hannerz, and Westin 2000), albeit moderated by class settlements within strong
national welfare states.
In the wake of the guest-worker and colonial immigration of the 1960s and 1970s and more recent
movements of forced migrants (religious, ethnic, linguistic, etc.) heterogeneities have increased again
in immigration contexts—and so also has their political expression as culturalized social facts. The
contemporary form of the social question has revolved around manifold heterogeneities. In addition to
class, they also refer to differences along gender, age, and sexual orientation; in the case of migration,
religion, nationality, and ethnicity have also entered the picture. More broadly, manifold movements
have emerged, clustering around identity issues, be they social feminist movements, lesbian, gay,
bisexual, trans, queer (LGBTQ) movements, or anti-globalization or food sovereignty groups. Various
social movements are nowadays involved in ‘counterhegemonic globalization’ (Evans 2006).
When seen in light of the new social movements coalescing around cultural differences (i.e.
heterogeneities), it seems at first sight that, relatively speaking, the class element of the
transnationalized social question has somewhat lost its prominence as an axis around which political
mobilization occurs. The general frame in which this has occurred is constituted by the differential
options of mobility for capital and labour. Whereas the mobility of labour is severely hampered by
the fact that exit from emigration countries raises no credible threat to governments or owners of
capital, and immigration policies are quite restrictive, the situation is different for capital. When
workers in immigration countries have asserted their collective voice vis-à-vis employers, the latter
have frequently responded by moving production to non-unionized locations, often overseas (Silver
2003). For capital, exit has constituted a credible threat to welfare state regulations.
These observations on the relocation of capital dovetail nicely with the claim that nowadays, it is
not class position in Marx’s sense that seems to matter most for one’s social position with respect to
income, but rather place of residence and membership. It appears as if residence and membership lie
at the root of the growing salience of culture in debates on migration and migrants. Yet what we
observe is not necessarily a declining significance of class but rather an increasing significance of
culture.
A strong indication of the importance of class as a major trench line is the gradual emergence of
welfare states in Western Europe, North America, and Australia as a response to working-class
mobilization, or, more precisely, the efforts of ruling elites to rein in class conflict. Nowadays, in
immigration countries, working-class internationalism seems to have given way to welfare state
nationalism, in some cases even welfare chauvinism. For example, in recent years, there has been a
fledgling movement of nationalistic, anti-immigrant political parties in Europe—ironically, an
international of nationalists (Kaya 2017) instead of the Socialist International.
In a nutshell, it is not only the increasing relevance of culture vis-à-vis class in political
contention that matters. Cross-border migration is also a field in which not only societal participation
is crucial but also recognition and membership and, hence, issues of citizenship. In other words,
migration and post-migration processes of movement and settlement, as well as return and circular
migration, inevitably raise questions of social inequality with respect to both participation and
recognition. The issue then is how cultural issues (i.e. communal relations) differ or are similar in the
time periods in question. With respect to Europe, the contemporary period is characterized by
increased migration from former colonially dominated territories to OECD countries. The presence of
Islam in Europe has grown; again, an underlying ‘orientalism’ has been at work (Said 1978).
Cultural distinctions are even more prominent in social movements from below. In a way, one may
provisionally conclude, cross-border migration has raised communal issues of membership in all
three periods, but more so nowadays than ever. This is related to the fact that cultural issues have
come to the forefront of political conflicts, as demonstrated by new social movements. Some
heterogeneities, such as gender, ethnicity, and race, have risen to prominence in public policies aimed
at addressing inequalities such as affirmative action and positive action (Skrentny 2002). More
generally, multiculturalism as a discursive and normative framework has furthered the perception of
claims along cultural lines and claims-making along these lines. Multiculturalism essentially aims to
further the process of what could be called the making of citizens—citizenization—via cultural rights.
It goes beyond an understanding of formal and legal equality of citizens and reaches toward a
substantive understanding of citizenship via recognition of cultural practices. In this notion of
citizenship it is not only the social integration of minorities and/or immigrants which is at stake but
national integration and thus social cohesion on a national scale. Correspondingly, the critics of
multiculturalism usually connect policies of multiculturalism with detrimental effects on national unity
—for example, claims about the incompatibility between a high degree of cultural diversity, such as
ethnic pluralism, and welfare state solidarity, as measured by welfare state expenditures and rights.
Also, some critics opine that the preoccupation with cultural issues keeps political activists from
engaging in class struggle (for criticism and a rejoinder, see Banting and Kymlicka 2006).
A critical point of focus is which heterogeneity is seized upon in the politicization of cultural
issues. This is important because it gives us clues as to categorizations relevant for the production of
inequalities. Public debates on migration and post-migration processes have revolved around religion
in Europe, almost exclusively Islam, and (Spanish) language (Zolberg and Woon 1999) and race in
the USA (Foner 2015). Again, Islam in Europe, language, and above all race in the USA are not
necessarily newly politicized heterogeneities. During the nineteenth century, Islam played a crucial
political role in European colonialism. Also, resistance to colonialism sometimes coalesced around
politicized Islam (e.g. Motadel 2014). In a way, contemporary cross-border migration could be
labelled under the banner ‘the empire strikes back’.
Often, in the context of cross-border migration, the heterogeneities involved in movement politics
revolve around cultural markers and concomitant boundaries, such as language, ethnicity, or religion.
In public debates about the consequences of cross-border migration, these are often politicized (Bail
2008). In other words, while culturalization in the sense of emphasis on communal relationships is an
inescapable by-product of migration, because membership questions are involved, it has also become
more relevant than ever because of two overlapping processes—multiculturalism in the context of the
rights revolution and the growing perception of transnational ties. It is also linked to more general
societal trends toward a culturalization of conflicts through a focus on cultural heterogeneities.
In sum, cross-border migration has resulted in the culturalization of heterogeneities ascribed to
migrants (and sometimes self-ascribed) in the sense of emphasis on communal relations. Such
political culturalization can be seen, throughout the past 200 years, as an inescapable by-product of
migration. Even beyond migration, culturalization of inequalities has reigned supreme. This has come
with a shift of debates and conflicts from issues of exploitation to those of the inclusion/exclusion
binary (cf. Somnek 2011: 11).
Accompanying this shift there has been a turn in conceptualizing the political subject of social
change. This state of affairs has two consequences detrimental to a wholesale politics around a single
dividing line. First, instead of the binary capital–labour, various dichotomies are politicized along
gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and other lines. One may even speak of competition
between identities, as evidenced in the discussion around multiculturalism, in which critics maintain
that a focus on the rights of minorities detracts from more important ones around class. Second, along
with a multiplication of heterogeneities around which politics of identity revolves, a focus on the
plight of minorities has arisen. Whereas the working class was conceptualized in socialist theory as
the majority and the dominant class of the future, the cultural turn has brought along a stronger focus
on minorities to be included in the various fields relevant for life chances.

Theory Inspiring Political Mobilization around the Social Question

How have the theories and concepts capturing the social question changed over time? To recognize
something as a social inequality or social injustice and to table it in the public sphere as part of the
social question requires a theory—understood in the very broad sense of an account of the genesis of
differences that matter with respect to resource distribution, status recognition, and power. In this way
both those concerned in politics and social scientists are actively participating in the social
constitution of what is perceived as the social question. In a nutshell, theories, and concepts of
analysis, produce a cognitive representation of social inequalities, often a sort of model which
focuses on features held to be essential. In this way theories can become concepts of practice. In other
words, class only existed when Marx and others had talked and theorized about it. Only then could
theories be used as toolboxes for political mobilization. Nowadays, however, a dominant theory
accounting for social inequalities that has been inspiring political action on a large scale cannot be
identified. The absence of radical alternatives is partly due to the collapse of communism in Eastern
Europe.
Still, offers abound, ranging from traditional Marxist accounts to post-modern and post-colonial
perspectives, and one candidate has already been encountered in more detail: multiculturalism. In
contrast to the nineteenth century, alternative scenarios for the future seem to have multiplied, as have
the groups clamouring for inclusion in the fields of education, politics, employment, housing, and
other central systems. From a politico-economic viewpoint, the questions embedded in and engaged
by theory as to social inequalities were different in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. In the
earlier time period, political economy was centrally concerned with the question of distribution. The
underlying question was thus whether capitalism was capable of generating a fair distribution of the
gains from economic growth. Theory inspired by Marxist lines of thought argued that a rising
concentration of power over the means of production and wealth could not be sustained politically.
Political mobilization of proletarians recurred in this context, with the rate of organization of the
working class both nationally, and transnationally in the Socialist International, at an all-time high.
The Socialist International explicitly opposed what it conceived as an imperialist order which upheld
the exploitation of workers worldwide. It found organized expression in the First International of the
socialist movement (1864) and the Second International (1899). As suggested earlier, the emergence
of welfare states in the global North somewhat changed the focus from distribution to redistribution.
In the third period a new dimension has been added, recognition—an issue the welfare state was
unable to address, with the interventionist welfare state being challenged by crises of legitimacy (see,
e.g. Habermas 1975).
 Much interest has centred on the role of the historical subject as a mover of historical progress. In
the classic version of the social question in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, this
agent clearly was a (social) class—the proletariat, in opposition to the bourgeoisie. Nowadays,
while class is undoubtedly a strong contender around which many social processes revolve, talk of
such a unified collective subject in the public and in the academic sphere has lost a great deal of
currency. Contemporary social and political theory does not undergird such an understanding of a
more or less cohesive subject, such as a ‘class for itself’. Analysts have even gone as far as insisting
that social class has lost its significance as an analytical category in the social sciences (Beck 2012).
While this may go too far, this position signals that the significance of class has shifted with respect to
other heterogeneities relevant for the distribution of life chances.
Clearly, cross-border mobilization still occurs around class. For example, we can speak of an
‘international social movement unionism’ which is also pushed by workers’ movements in the global
South (Sutcliffe 2012). And, at least partly outside formalized channels, there is the ‘Southern
Initiative on Globalization and Trade Union Rights’, accompanied by the rise of rural
internationalism, such as the International Peasant Movement (Van der Linden 2003). There are also
theoretical accounts which inspire collective action of the alter-mondialistes in arenas such as the
World Social Forum (WSF), for example, the idea of ‘multitude’ (Hardt and Negri 2000),
characterized by various mixes of a wide range of socialist, anarchist, eco-socialist, and anti-
corporate groups. But the clear message of the teleological gospel of socialist modernization or any
other sort of modernization theory is largely missing. Also, the political subject seems to have moved
from class-based to culturally-based agents, the latter of which are often held to be minorities.
Above all, we observe the culturalization of class in the field of migration. At first sight it seems
as if cultural heterogeneities have declined as a basis for selecting immigrants. For example, national
origin as a criterion for admitting migrants has gone out of fashion not only in the USA but also in
Europe. It is nowadays considered unfair procedure violating basic human rights. The decline of
discrimination based on ascriptive heterogeneities is not simply superseded by class. Instead, class-
based selection is based on skill. Whereas the low-skilled are increasingly economically unwanted,
the high-skilled are wanted and welcome, with the underlying assumption that the latter category is
better able to integrate into the national fold. This means that those economically wanted are ascribed
better chances for cultural integration (Chapter 8). In short, this is an instance of the culturalization of
class. We thus have not moved from exploitation to inclusion/exclusion but rather towards class-
based cum membership-based social closure: class-based criteria such as skill level are taken as a
proxy for prospective cultural membership and thus citizenship.
It is this argument that needs to be considered when seeking to capture the context, policies (Part
II), and politics (Part III) of the social question. We need to treat various heterogeneities according to
which categorizations and ultimately inequalities are (re)produced, not just class or just culture (e.g.
ethnicity, religion, language). There is an elective affinity with the cultural turn in the social sciences
on the one side, and the culturalization of politics on the other. The relative significance of culture
vis-à-vis class in accounting for the social question has proceeded in a temporal sequence, also
reflected in social scientific paradigms. In this process, class has lost its essentialist meaning. In a
way, the main perspective of research in fields such as historical sociology or social history has
moved from a materialistic one on classes from the 1960s and 1980s onwards—and their application
to nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments—to an understanding of class that is discursively
constructed as a political category (Eley and Nield 2007: 6–12). In social history, for example, this
change corresponds to a more general tendency to focus on the cultural instead of the social-structural
basis of categories such as class. To an increasing extent, it was not simply large structural processes
such as industrialization or imperialism and their direct effects on politics for the everyday history of
‘simple people’ that caught the attention of social historians. In essence, with the political relevance
of socialist theory on the wane, so was the conception of a brighter future attained through class
struggle. This move away from a materialist perspective was inspired, among other trends, by a
greater consideration of anthropology in the humanities and, in the social sciences, by discourse
analysis pioneered by Michel Foucault in the genealogy or archaeology of knowledge (Foucault
1972). Paralleling the political crisis of Marxism, there was a revision of Marx’s idea of
superstructure and a renewed focus on agency, mostly of historically and hitherto excluded categories.
Next to a constructivist understanding of class, heterogeneities such as race and gender gained more
prominence, certainly in intersectional feminist analysis (Collins 2000). Those more materialistically
oriented analysts developed theories of the (re)production of social inequalities which incorporated
an emphasis on how markers such as race, gender, and class were used to create stratified labour
markets, and how resistance to such categorizations propelled the politics of work (Tilly 1998).
Ultimately, there will be no return to the old, materialistic understanding of class, although labour-
movement activism is far from dead (cf. Buhle and Georgakas 1996). However, it is desirable to
include both discursive and social-structural elements in the analysis of both class and other, cultural,
heterogeneities. In the apt words of Eley and Nield, it is a matter of ‘disengaging class from the
previously assumed sovereignty of “objective” economic and social interests without turning it into
an artefact of language or a figment of the collective imagination’ (Eley and Nield 2007: 103).
Theoretical considerations on the contemporary transnationalized social question need to speak to
the issue of legitimizing social inequalities. There are different ways of understanding the social
question. While it is a global question, the outcomes are experienced at the local level. It thus also
concerns local social struggles, motivated by everyday concerns of making a living (see, e.g.
Chimienti 2011). Responses from below or ‘counter movements’ in the sense used by Polanyi (2001
[1944]: 77) include not only political, religious, or nationalist movements but also migration
strategies connected to livelihood. Hence we are in need not just of an analysis of policies and
politics in a narrow sense, but exit and voice in a broad sense.

Outlook: Putting the Social Question to Rest?

The return of the transnational since the late twentieth century reflects an increased recognition of the
prominence of cross-border linkages in other fields as well, such as production and communication.
Indeed, there is a much wider cross-border horizon nowadays owing to an increasing perception and
awareness of cross-border interdependencies, such as migration, military threats, climate change,
and, more broadly, environmental degradation and destruction. On the one hand, there are empirically
identifiable global trends in meta-principles such as the postulates of equality and democracy that
show a shift in public awareness concerning transnational exchange and interdependence (Furia
2005). More information about, and possibly even greater knowledge of, transnational social
inequality, are available now than was the case in the past to scholars and publics alike (Inglehart
2003). On the other hand, the return of the transnational in the way of an integrated world market and
the consequences of that integrated world market create fears and resistance which have been
expressed in concerns over cross-border migration, such as the securitization of migration and the
culturalization of conflicts.
 The historical comparative sketch provided in this chapter, covering three time periods since the
nineteenth century, has established the transnationalized social question as a concept of analysis,
research that can shed light on the puzzle through empirical investigation spanning the past 200 years.
The similarities and differences between these three periods suggest that both welfare state
development and the perception of heterogeneities with respect to class and culture are central issues
to be taken into account. A note of caution is in order. Welfare state development mainly refers to the
global North since the organization of social protection differs widely not only among countries in the
global South and in the global North but also between the global South and global North. Moreover,
there may be functional equivalents to welfare state development such as the developmental state
(Chapter 4).
One central result of the foregoing analysis is that the transnationalization of cross-border flows
and the concomitant process of increasing cultural diversity have challenged the welfare state which
rests on nationally bound solidarity, reciprocity, and class compromise. In this third period, the
recognition of gender, ethnicity, religion, and related heterogeneities cannot be meaningfully regulated
by the classical welfare state, not least because social change has resulted in shifting the risks for life
chances from groups to individuals. It is the regulatory and not the redistributive welfare state which
is active in the field of heterogeneities, in which there seems to be no need for coherent social classes
in order to express voice (cf. Rosanvallon 2011).
Without a strong welfare state element, the EU may even further contribute to this development.
Friedrich von Hayek was one of the first to preview such an option in a prescient essay (von Hayek
1942). In his opinion, the social question should preferably be solved in an international federation of
states in which economic liberalism rules over issues of solidarity and diffuse reciprocity. In such a
federation the social question is primarily about issues of poverty instead of de-commodification.
Hayek argued that an international federation would exercise a disempowering effect on any
ambitious social policy. He conceived of a European interstate federation mainly as a peace and an
economic project (Somnek 2012). In a way, an interstate federation, which bears some resemblance
to the current scope of institutionalization of the EU, is an ingenious idea to put the transnationalized
social question to rest. Yet the future is still open as to the further development of the EU.
Nonetheless, transnationalization in general and supranationalization of the social question in the EU
in particular mean that ambitious issues of thick understandings of equality and solidarity take a back
seat while thin conceptions dominate the discussions on social policy (cf. Münch 2001).
As this chapter has sketched in broad strokes the historical-structural contours of the
transnationalized social question, we are now in a position to delve into how migration and
transnationality are implicated and involved in forging new inequalities and reinforcing old ones
(Chapter 3), how governance provides social rights and social standards regarding social protection
of migrants and their significant others (Chapter 4), and how this plays out in the (re)production of
inequalities (Chapters 5 and 6). It is crucial to note that the social mechanisms identified in the
chapters to come always have to be seen in light of the macro-historical conditions discussed here.

Notes
1. Needless to say, the relatively low rate of global cross-border mobility is also due to other factors, including the inability of the poorest
segments of populations to cross borders or to take the option of internal migration. On cumulative immobility and mobility, see
Hammar et al. (1997).
 Article 1 states: ‘The State Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for
2. himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions.’
3. An incomplete list of the declarations, treaties, and institutional safeguards includes (1) at UN level: the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the International Covenant on Economic, Social
and Cultural Rights (1966), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965), the
Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984), the Convention on the Rights
of the Child (1989); (2) at European level: the Charter of Fundamental Rights (2000) with the European Court of Justice in
Luxembourg, the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1958) with the European Court of Human
Rights in Strasbourg; and (3) in other regions of the world: the American Convention on Human Rights (1969), the Inter-American
Court of Human Rights (1979), and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1981).
4. The eight chief conventions include the following: on the freedom of association—C87 on the Freedom of Association and
Protection of the Right to Organise and C98 on the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining; on forced labour—C29 Forced
Labour Convention and C105 Concerning the Abolition of Forced Labour; on non-discrimination (employment and occupation)—
C100 Concerning Equal Remuneration for Men and Women Workers for Work of Equal Value and C111 Discrimination (Employment
and Occupation) Convention; and on the elimination of child labour—C138 Minimum Age Convention and C182 Worst Forms of
Child Labour Convention.
5. The Dublin Convention which came into force in 1997 and, after Amsterdam, was re-elaborated as a legally binding EU regulation in
2003. The ‘Dublin’ principle is that asylum is to be a one-stop process and that a claim can be made in only one EU member state.
Since the Treaty of Amsterdam in 2001, the EU has also elaborated other aspects of a common asylum system covering the
definition of refugee status, conditions for the reception of asylum-seekers, and a database on rejected claims (European Asylum
Dactyloscopy Database: EURODAC).
6. ‘Freedom, equality, fraternity, you can always tout/praise these values—but sooner or later, you will see that the problem of identity
will appear. Where is fraternity? Why has one never known it? Exactly because France has never understood the problem of identity.
You, you are a man with rights getting all the respect one needs, and I, I am also a man, I also have rights. Respect me. At this
moment we are brothers, we embrace each other. That is fraternity’ (own translation).
3

The Nexus of Cross-Border Migration and Social

Inequalities

Cross-border migration is a visible reflection of global inequalities, whether in terms of well-being,

freedom, security, income, wealth, business and employment opportunities, power, or prestige.
Migration is not only one of ‘humankind’s oldest actions against poverty’ (Galbraith 1979: 9). It also
holds the promise of upward social mobility, providing a relatively quick path for individuals and
groups to overcome the gap between wealthier and poorer regions when compared to other options,
such as economic growth of emigration countries, or the redistribution of resources between and
within countries. Not only do economic inequalities loom large as a set of factors inducing migration,
but so also do failure of governance, war-related violence, and, increasingly, anthropogenic
environmental destruction. An abundance of literature deals with the link between migration and
inequalities only indirectly, most often through topics such as the impact of migration on economic
development, or the integration of migrants. Yet surprisingly little research directly addresses the role
of social inequalities with respect to the overall picture of the causes, drivers, dynamics, and
consequences of cross-border migration. We need to establish core mechanisms of the (re)production
of social inequalities in a general manner before delving into their significance in the field of social
protection.
Obviously, cross-border migration and its relationship to inequalities have to do with the
distribution of costs and benefits for migrants and non-migrants alike. What is least researched are the
social mechanisms operative in producing social inequalities. The aim of this chapter is not a
comprehensive list of mechanisms but a starting point (cf. Therborn 2014: 54–67). This goal raises at
least two major questions. First, how do social inequalities affect opportunities for different socio-
economic groups to migrate across borders? Second, conversely, how do the outcomes of migration
affect social inequalities for global patterns of distribution and life chances in the countries of
emigration and the countries of immigration? Of ultimate interest is whether migration buttresses the
dominant forms of social hierarchies, or whether it transforms the distribution of valued goods in a
fundamental way. The answers to these questions help to gauge the role of migration in how the
transnationalized social question is discussed and plays out politically, a set of issues discussed in
later chapters (7, 8, and 9).
Cross-border mobility and migration play a role in various concepts of inequalities which seek to
capture processes and outcomes beyond the national state: ‘transnational capitalist class’ (Sklair
2001), ‘transnational middle class’ (Weiß 2017), ‘migrant proletariat’ (Portes and Walton 1981), and
‘global precariat’ (Standing 2011). This short and incomplete list already indicates that cross-border
mobility has to take into account that the categories of migrants have become ever more diverse, not
least as a result of legal categorizations applied by countries of immigration. In general, migration has
become more heterogeneous, which is expressed in two interrelated ways.
First, there has been an increase of mixed forms of migration, which are blurring classical migrant
categories. Mixed migration suggests that causes and motivations can be mixed at the beginning of the
journey, can change during movement, or shift during the sojourn. Moreover, people can move in
mixed migratory flows, or find themselves in mixed migrant communities during the journey or after
arrival (van Hear 2009). To start with, there are mixed motives for migration, such as economic,
social (family), lifestyle, and political. Furthermore, the motivations keep changing en route. For
example, refugees from the Syrian war may escape violence and the threat to bare existence; once
they have reached a safe haven, their motivations to move on may change to economic ones. Syrian
refugees may find an abode in adjacent countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey; they may,
however, move onwards because of poor living conditions and few economic prospects. In essence,
while they remain forced migrants, they first move for reasons of physical survival and then out of
economic necessity. This means that the temporalities in current migration flows are altering, and
perhaps for very different reasons, such as changing immigration policies (Castles and Ozkul 2014),
the rise of migration industries (Xiang and Lindquist 2014), human trafficking networks (Gammeltoft-
Hansen and Nyberg-Sorensen 2013), or improvements in communication and transportation
technologies as well as migrants’ long-term aspirations (Ottonelli and Torresi 2010). In addition,
migration groups may include people who move to escape conflict as well as those who are seeking
socio-economic betterment—sometimes also called ‘composite flows’ by the Office of the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (see also Kumin 2014). Also, certain migrant
categories have increased in importance. For instance, the internationalization of education (Findlay
et al. 2012) led to a significant increase in international student mobility to Europe. Inflows of
international students between 2012 and 2015 to the EU increased by around 35 per cent (Eurostat
2016a). Labour shortages and demographic transitions in many classical immigration countries also
have led to the creation of policies to attract highly skilled migrants. This is reflected in the case of
the EU where, between 2011 and 2015, the number of incoming highly skilled migrants increased by
more than 12 per cent (Eurostat 2016b). Second, a growing diversification of drivers of migration has
been observed, linked, for instance, to threats to human security due to armed conflicts or
environmental degradation (Castles, de Haas, and Miller 2014). The increase in the numbers of
armed conflicts all over the world, with the added effects of climate change (Wodon et al. 2014),
have led to a significant increase in humanitarian migration toward European countries—more than
200 per cent in the peak year of 2015 (Eurostat 2016c).

Inequalities Shaping Migration

Quite a few migration theories all mention various sorts of inequalities at the root of cross-border
migration: neo-classical economics emphasizes income differentials between regions or countries;
dependency theories focus on economic heterogeneities in the global South which advance
underdevelopment, such as economically highly developed zones vis-à-vis peripheral areas and
zones of poverty; and the world systems approach foregrounds centre–periphery asymmetries which
reflect gross inequalities in opportunities between countries. Political sociology looks at political
power differentials between emigration and immigration regions which find expression in social
closure against migrants through migration control. Mid-range theoretical concepts such as cumulative
causation highlight the endogeneity of migration dynamics through self-feeding mechanisms such as
the reduction of costs and risks for migration. These costs and risks are unequally distributed,
depending—among other things—on the participation in migrant and migration networks. The New
Economics of Labour Migration (NELM) theory starts from the insight concerning high risks to ensure
livelihood in the rural countryside and the subsequent need for diversification through mobility. And,
finally, livelihood approaches emphasize inequalities in resource availability and spread which
underlie decisions to exit. All in all, the inequalities mentioned range from specific variables such as
income, in neo-classical theories, to more comprehensive ones such as life chances, in livelihood
approaches.
In neo-classical economic theories it is the individual calculus of costs and benefits among
potential migrants which is decisive for migration to take off (e.g. Todaro 1970); hence, there is a
focus on resource inequalities, mostly income. In this respect there seems to exist an advantage of
cross-border migration over internal migration: on average, cross-border movement yields more
income than internal migration, and intercontinental migration usually the most (King and Skeldon
2010). This is so because the most attractive destinations are the OECD countries located in Europe,
North America, Australasia, and, in addition, the Gulf States. By contrast, the main emigration
countries are located in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and South and Southeast Asia, with
an increasing number of countries experiencing both in- and outmigration. The richer potential
migrants are (in relative terms), the greater the tendency to migrate to faraway countries.
Metaphorically speaking, the main mechanism is one of gravity caused by income differentials.
The challenges to neo-classical theories with respect to inequalities are twofold. First, generally
only one sort of inequality is taken into account: income. However, as many forms of forced migration
suggest, such differentials are accompanied or even superseded by factors such as direct violence or
indirect—structural—violence. Second, this approach does not take full heed of the insight that
migration can best be accounted for as a multi-causal phenomenon. Take the debate on environmental
migration: other than in some extreme cases, environmental degradation as such rarely leads to large-
scale movements. Also, effective means of migration control result in the fact that close to 95 per cent
of all refugees remain either trapped in their countries of origin, or get only as far as adjacent
countries. Only a small percentage makes it into OECD countries (Zetter 2015). Migrants do not
necessarily make it to the most attractive destinations.
In political economy approaches, which are grounded in dependency and world systems theories,
the main mechanism which underlies migration and which reinforces inequalities by way of migration
is the unequal terms of trade between centre and periphery, including the semi-periphery. The
concepts of structural penetration and ‘imbalancing’ of peripheral areas create the conditions for mass
displacement from them (Portes and Walton 1981). In this set of perspectives, underdevelopment
leads to the loss of the formally well-educated and most qualified persons, who migrate from the
periphery to the centres within the underdeveloped world and, above all, to industrialized countries,
in other words, brain drain. This outmigration, in turn, is thought to contribute to even greater
underdevelopment as a structural heterogeneity, and to increased migration flows through the
asymmetric distribution of benefits and resources working in favour of the economically developed
centres. By and large, political economy approaches view both social inequalities and mobilities as
part and parcel of greater social transformations, that is, periods of both increased inequalities and
augmented migration. Social transformation refers to a profound shift in how social relations are
organized (Castles, Özkul, and Cubas 2015: 4). Take, as an example, predatory capitalism, expressed
since the 1970s in neo-liberal policies, such as structural adjustment measures leveraged upon
countries in the global South, and nowadays increasingly at the centre, also in the form of austerity
policies. Such policies increase inequalities within emigration regions, and thus strengthen forces
pushing toward emigration. In general, although these politico-economic theories consider structural
violence and thus politico-economic asymmetries between emigration and immigration countries, they
usually do not take into account political factors, such as war-related violence, as relatively
autonomous causes of migration.
Adding up the insights of various political economy approaches, one may construct a cascade
pattern: inequalities → relocation → migration. Growing income disparities between national states
over time have generated strong incentives, such as drastically lower wages and a more docile labour
force in poorer countries, to outsource skilled and unskilled jobs to peripheral countries in a market
bypass to overcome constraints on labour flows. The relocation of production has probably
contributed to renewed migration (Sassen 1990), especially to those countries that featured relatively
less restrictive migration policies, for example the USA, Canada, or Australia, for the highly skilled.
The years since the 1990s have seen an increase in legal admission categories, and many OECD
countries have redesigned their labour immigration policies to favour the intake of labour classified
as highly skilled. In sum, both the relocation of production and global inequality have become driving
forces for cross-border migration and its consequences.
Income inequality between countries accounted for roughly two-thirds of overall world income
inequality in the 1990s. Although there is much debate about countervailing trends with respect to the
past two decades, this pattern has been remarkably stable over the past 200 years (Chapter 1).
Following the pattern of global income distribution, which has become more unequal over time, one
may surmise that spatial mobility has become ever more important in addressing social inequalities
because of the increasing significance of location and membership—citizenship, in particular. This
argument points towards a change in the dominant inequalities, in that income has been connected
increasingly with membership in social units, national states above all, complementing exploitation as
one of the main mechanisms of inequalities. While this argument may describe a plausible migration
potential, it needs to be augmented by bringing in mobilizing factors: although the pull exerted by
wages, for example, is higher today than more than a century ago, there is a massive factor mitigating
mobility across borders, namely, that the overwhelming majority of immigration countries enforces
much greater control and restriction than in the past (Gozzini 2006). As to the mechanisms of
inequalities driving migration, a combined economic and political perspective would suggest that it is
primarily both exploitation in capitalist markets and selective social closure through national states,
and dislocation or displacement in regions of origin, which pattern the chances for cross-border
movement.
More recent politico-economic approaches raise questions about the limits of using income
inequality or physical-structural violence as concepts to capture exclusionary processes and
outcomes. These newer approaches direct our focus from open war and civil wars to more slow-
moving destruction and expulsion. While the focus on (income) inequalities still assumes some sort of
inclusion in societal arrangements of what could be considered the mainstream, there is also quasi-
total exclusion from institutions, one important mechanism of which is expulsion. While the majority
of displaced persons across the globe continue to be forcibly expelled from their homes due to
political conflicts and persecution of discriminated groups (Koser and Martin 2011), there is also an
increase in the numbers expelled due to environmental degradation and disaster (Chapter 10). These
latter circumstances go hand in hand with political conflict. Expulsion as a notion goes beyond mere
inequalities and moves to an analysis of those situations of vulnerability, where people are expelled
from land, jobs, and homes, and from their biosphere (Sassen 2014). To a degree, we find an
anthropogenic environmental situation which overlaps with neo-liberal policies (the shift from
Keynesianism to the global era of privatization, deregulation, and open borders) and pure physical
violence. Such processes of environmental destruction are augmented by the consequences of climate
change. Since the ecological spatial capacity of the earth is limited and the consequences of epochal
climate change and discontinuous environmental degradation are unequally distributed, issues of
vulnerability of weaker social categories abound. The global North plunders resources by, for
example, turning territories in the South into production zones for the North, as can be observed in the
massive land-grabbing for agricultural purposes in sub-Saharan Africa. In turn, such appropriation
and the ensuing monocultures accelerate environmental degradation in the global South (McLeman,
Schade, and Faist 2016). While such recent processes of expulsion caused by land acquisition for
agribusiness, exploitation of minerals, and water tables in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia
resemble the primitive accumulation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Marx 1962 [1867]:
741–91), the underlying factors are somewhat different. Among other factors, it is financialization—
that is, the creation of ever more complex financial products—that is driving resource extraction in
the global South. As a consequence, the dislocation does not result in more or less voluntary
migration but in forced migration because of the direct and indirect violence exerted, resulting in ‘the
loss of habitat’ (Sassen 2016).
A broad prediction of historically oriented politico-economic perspectives is that emigration is
positively associated with inequality and exclusion in the country of origin. This has been
demonstrated in the well-researched period of late nineteenth-century Europe, comparing conditions
in which landowners monopolized most resources in agriculture (e.g. Eastern Europe) and those in
which land was more evenly distributed and industrialization could absorb those displaced from
agriculture. Emigration to the Americas was higher in the former than in the latter (Senghaas 1985).
More generally, the European experience over the past 200 years seems to suggest that early stages of
economic development tend to cause rising inequality (Kuznets curve), though evidence of falling
inequality at later stages of development is weaker (Piketty 2014). Clearly, these theories suggest
that, with respect to inequalities in emigration societies, migration rates for low-skilled workers,
ceteris paribus, are higher from economically and politically unequal societies than from more
egalitarian ones, and ‘middle-income’ countries are among the most inegalitarian (Connor, Cohn, and
Gonzalez-Barrera 2013). For example, low earners leave unequal Mexico for the USA because there
is little chance of climbing the steep social stratification ladder in Mexico. This seems to be true not
only at the national level but also at the village level: more unequal villages send more migrants (e.g.
Mosse et al. 2002 on India).
In addition to micro-scale theories, such as NELM, which conceptualize migration as a response
to the inability to obtain formal insurance (Stark 1991), or as a way to diversify income via migration
as an informal loan arrangement (Poirine 1997), there is also the livelihood approach, which
observes inequalities in resource availability and spread, and conceives of migration, again, as a way
to diversify income sources via remittances (F. Ellis 2000; cf. Horst et al. 2014). Yet this picture is
more complex than it seems at first sight. We would expect, ceteris paribus, a higher rate of
emigration from egalitarian than from inegalitarian societies among the highly skilled, such as from
Sweden for the USA because of higher taxes in the former country (cf. Borjas 1994). Yet we still lack
systematic evidence for this thesis in a historically comparative way. In short, these insights suggest
that it is not just the level of development which drives outmigration—as the terms migration hump,
mobility transition, migration transition, migration curve, or inverted U-curve, and so on suggest—but
also the extent of a fair distribution of national and local income.
It is the ability to make choices about staying or leaving which makes a difference for the
distribution of goods (and for socio-economic opportunities). This ability to be mobile—called
motility or mobility capital (Kaufmann, Bergmann, and Joyce 2004: 754)—is a necessary
prerequisite. It may be useful to see motility as a continuum and thus connected to migrations as lying
on a continuum between free and coerced forms, often coexisting within the same flow. However, the
question is who holds mobility capital and with what effect? If most migrants were to come from the
poorest sections, this would act to reduce both poverty and economic inequality at least, ceteris
paribus. But the majority of cross-border migrants are not the poorest, and other factors are not equal,
so we have to consider (self-)selectivity. The question then is how selectivity works. A perspective
focusing on endogenous processes gives insights into the role of inequalities feeding the dynamics of
migration, its continuation, and its resilience over time. The main mechanism is cumulative causation,
which holds that migration can be cast as a process of social diffusion and diminishing costs (Massey
1990). This process can be split roughly into three phases—in the first, the relatively better off
participate and benefit; in the second, the poorer segments of the population migrate; and in the third,
migration tapers off (on Atlantic migration in the nineteenth century, see Gould 1980). Later migrants
may aspire to the material resources and the social status of pioneer migrants. They are among the
less wealthy segments of the population who engage in migration as an increasingly common practice
(see Durand and Massey 2006 on Mexico). In the latter case it is not relative deprivation but the
chance to escape absolute deprivation which is driving emigration, often as irregular migration (see
Ambrosini 2017 on Southern Europe; Zewdu 2017 on Ethiopia). The impact of irregular migration is
limited, since these migrants can only send remittances and cannot interact with those left behind
through (regular) visits (Castles et al. 2012).
Overall, examples of diffusion and feedback are abundant across the world, ranging from the
Eastern Punjab in India (S. Taylor, Singh, and Booth 2007) to Burkina Faso (Breusers 1998). It
should be kept in mind that the diffusion processes following in the wake of pioneer migration do not
occur quasi-automatically in reaction to wage differentials between emigration and immigration
regions. Rather, such S-shaped migration curves, in which the phase after initial migration is
followed by a steep increase through migrant and migration networks and brokerage, also strongly
depend on legal opportunities and provisions, and on the political situation in the sites of origin
(Hollifield, Martin, and Orrenius 2014). In short, it is social and symbolic rather than material
inequalities which are decisive for migration, with resources such as social capital embedded in
networks driving down material costs of mobility so that the somewhat poorer segments of the
population may also migrate.
Migration as a self-feeding process gains from its connection with the mechanism of relative
deprivation: as the costs of migration decline, the desires for migration grow faster than the
opportunities to engage in long-distance cross-border mobility via legal entry or residence (Mackie
1995). In contrast, internal migration is more often fed by conditions of absolute deprivation (Stark
and Taylor 1991). Objective conditions thus predictably change the subjective experience of
inequalities. To the extent that relative deprivation results in an increase in irregular migration
because of the absence of sufficient slots for regular migration, it contributes to further stratification
in immigration contexts. Macro-developments described above frame and add to relative deprivation.
For example, over the past two decades the number of attractive destination countries has not
increased as much as the number of emigration countries (Czaika and de Haas 2014).
The impact of social mobility and inequalities on return migration is largely unexplored, although
voluntary migration flows often have a sizable minority returning to regions of origin (e.g. Gmelch
1980). One would expect that return will be higher among those migrants who have experienced no
upward social mobility in the immigration region, and low among those who have indeed experienced
upward social mobility. More interestingly, it might also be low among those who have suffered
downward mobility because they expect shaming in the place of origin (King 2000). By and large,
however, these hunches have not yet been systematically scrutinized beyond singular cases.
Politico-sociological approaches, which emphasize inequalities associated with the immigration
side, start with the insight that state formation and state migration control have developed
concomitantly (Zolberg 2006), and one may add also the production of migrants forced to move
during such transformations. Pre-nineteenth-century evidence suggests that trade regimes and
economic conjunctures were more important factors than the state (Hoerder 2003: 1–21). State
formation and failure are especially relevant also for the production of forced migrants in general and
refugees in particular. In some countries, certain categories of people are persecuted by their
governments, or may be victims of general violence, such as civil war and low-intensity conflicts.
There is thus a desire or even need to ‘escape from violence’ (Zolberg, Suhrke, and Aguayo 1989).
There is extant research about how violent armed conflict and migration spur forced migration; and
there is research on post-conflict reconstruction, often with considerable institutional support from
international NGOs and international organizations. By contrast, there have been few efforts to
conceptualize and empirically capture the link between large-scale criminal violence and its impact
on migration (cf. International Crisis Group 2016).
Power asymmetries between emigration and immigration states are also at the heart of the main
mechanism of selective and categorical exclusion. As to selection, the mechanism of social closure
with respect to membership is central since it determines who can or should be admitted to the
territory of the (immigration) state (Chapter 2). Ascriptive criteria centred on citizenship today
continue to be the fundamental basis of inequalities and hierarchies in the contemporary world,
although some obviously discriminatory admission policies based on ethnic selectivity have been
replaced by more universalistic principles (Joppke 2005). It has been observed that group-specific
characteristics, such as ethnicity, race, or religion, which serve as heterogeneities along which
persons are categorized, have declined in importance for official admission policies, whereas
individual traits, such as education and language (acquisition), have come to play a more prominent
role in liberal-democratic immigration states (cf. Brubaker 2014). In general, formal citizenship is
thus an institutional mechanism ensuring inclusion of citizens (and, partly, non-citizen residents), and
exclusion of those outside the rich and bounded national state (Shachar 2009: 11). The importance of
formal citizenship becomes obvious when looking at cross-border mobility. Currently (2018), a
citizen of the United States or the European Union may cross borders without a visa for three months
in approximately 170 countries. Yet for a citizen from Afghanistan, Somalia, or Eritrea, the countries
that can be accessed without a visa can be counted on the fingers of two hands (see also Mau et al.
2015).
In sum, this strand of research suggests that legal equality among citizens (insiders) also depends
on categorical exclusion of outsiders. More generally, the institutional arrangements characteristic of
countries with the low inequality pattern—mostly economically highly developed countries and
liberal democracies—do restrict access to opportunity for large sectors of the world’s population.
Hence, the establishment of the relatively low inequality pattern within immigration countries and the
persistence of high inequalities between emigration countries on the one hand and immigration
countries on the other have to be thought of together. In other words, these findings would suggest that
inequality patterns across the world are interdependent—a truly global pattern which underlies the
transnationalized social question.
In this sense, it could be argued that the relative privilege characterizing high-income national
states has required institutional arrangements ensuring the exclusion of the vast majority of others
from access to opportunity. In other words, the same institutional mechanisms through which
inequalities have historically been reduced within national states in the global North have often
accentuated, though not necessarily caused, the (selective) exclusion of people from poorer countries.

Inequalities as Outcomes of Migration

A wide variety of approaches can be used to shed light on the impact of cross-border migration on
inequalities. To name only a few, historical-economic studies suggest that transatlantic migration in
the nineteenth century served as a safety valve for emigration countries across Europe and a welcome
supply of labour for settler colonies. Economic approaches have addressed the equalization of the
factors of production between emigration and immigration regions in case of a high degree of cross-
border migration. The transnational perspective has raised questions with respect to which groups
benefit most from cross-border transactions of remittances and the often disparate social position of
migrants when comparing their social position in immigration and emigration states. This issue is
closely related to the consequences of (reverse) financial remittances, brain drain, and potential
poverty reduction discussed in the bulk of empirically oriented studies. With respect to emigration
countries, politico-sociological approaches have dealt with, among other issues, the trade-off
between rights vs. numbers and the impact of ‘social remittances’ (Levitt 1998) on democratization
and gender equality. With respect to immigration states, such approaches have addressed the ‘liberal
paradox’ of closure of access to full membership on the one hand, and granting basic human rights to
those present in the territory on the other, whereas the sociology of culture has highlighted the
performative role of language in the processes of group categorizations. Concepts available in
political sociology and the sociology of culture, in particular, have contributed to pushing forward
questions about the mechanisms accounting for the (re)production of inequalities in post-migration
processes.

Globalization and Transnationalization

Historical evidence from some major cross-border mobility flows suggests that cross-border
migration can be a force in correcting transnational inequalities of income and life chances, for
example, by reducing wage differences between emigration and immigration regions. Transatlantic
migration had this effect in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries,
contributing to wage equalization between the Americas and Europe, for instance by way of easing
the demographic transition in many parts of Europe. Crucially, compared to today’s cross-border
migrations, the relative volume measured by the share of emigrants among the population of
emigration countries was much higher (Hatton and Williamson 2005), so that migration probably
reduced income inequalities more than other capital flows raised them. Comparative historical
research suggests that cross-border migration no longer has the macro-economic impact via
remittances and demographic transitions that it had a hundred years ago in promoting economic
convergence between the Americas and Europe. Nowadays, the impact of cross-border migration is
above all a counterweight to the relative ageing rate in the countries of immigration but it is of minor
relevance for taking pressure off the labour market and boosting real wages in the regions of
emigration (O’Rourke and Williamson 1999: chapters 8 and 9). In short, the macro-economic
relevance of cross-border migration and thus its role as an instrument of wage and income
equalization has declined today compared to the turn of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century
because of generally lower levels of actual migration relative to potential migration. In general,
however, an important caveat has to be observed in such deliberations. It is difficult to identify any
sort of migration impact for cross-border mobility of any kind within the overall matrix of change and
transformation that is occurring. To put it simply, with respect to welfare state development in the
global North and its functional corollary, the developmental state in the global South, ‘rarely if ever
has any causality been established convincingly’ (Dercon and Shapiro 2007: 109). This proposition,
with respect to global and transnational spaces, emigration regions, and immigration areas, can be
analysed as follows.
The first approach is balanced growth in an interdependent global economy, which predicts
convergence between emigration and immigration regions in regard to resource availability and
income distribution, and, at least in the long run, declining income inequalities and wealth. In a
straightforward way, this approach assumes that—if migration rates are high enough—factor
equalization will tend to follow. In a global view, migration can be seen as a re-equilibration of the
unequal distribution of global resources. Early studies sought to determine the effects of open borders
(Hamilton and Whaley 1984), postulating that global gross domestic product (GDP) could double as
a consequence of completely free migration and thus contribute to wage equalization worldwide,
benefiting above all the population in the global South while disadvantaging, relatively speaking, the
working class in the global North. Following this perspective, a truly free flow of people across the
world, in fact, would provide the fastest means for thoroughly transforming the conditions that have
characterized global stratification for the past 200 years. In essence, open borders would be the
logical expression of a sort of global economic libertarianism. Yet, it is far from clear that open
borders would benefit the poorest members of world society (Harris 2007), not least because cross-
border migration requires the availability of various sorts of capital—social, cultural, and economic.
The second perspective is built on the assumptions of asymmetrical growth and power. As
discussed above with respect to dependency theories, migration contributes to underdevelopment in
emigration regions, perpetuates economic dependency, and strengthens the very structural
heterogeneities via a feedback loop by destroying economic resources, undermining traditional ways
of life, and weakening social ties (Delgado Wise 2014). Some of the deleterious effects of emigration
include its social costs, such as the separation of families for extended periods. The social costs
incurred may be higher for temporary migration, which is more likely to bring about extended
separation between family members, than for permanent migration.
There is a third perspective which posits that negative outcomes dominate the impact of migration
in the short run. For example, although openness could benefit emigration countries and decrease
resource inequalities between certain groups, it could lead to losses of equality in immigration
countries, while deleterious effects, such as brain drain, may be observed in emigration countries.
Nonetheless, positive outcomes tend to dominate in the long term (Papademetriou and Martin 1991).
Thus, in this view, there is a greater variety of positive and negative migration outcomes. While
proponents of all three approaches tend to agree that the economic impact for receiving countries is
clearly positive, they disagree on the costs and benefits for emigration regions. Gains primarily
accrue to individual migrants and, by implication, to associated households. It clearly makes a
difference whether the analysis centres on individuals, households, the national state, transnational
social spaces, or the global scale.
In a world characterized by rather strict state migration controls, the central trade-off with respect
to regular migration is between rights and numbers (Ruhs 2013). The trade-off is between either
employing high numbers of migrant workers, which contributes to optimizing the flow of remittances
from immigration to emigration regions, or having high standards of (social) rights for all workers,
migrant workers included, which ensures that migrants encounter decent working conditions. Seeking
to maximize the first option, numbers—as many low-income countries and development agencies do
—makes for flexible labour markets characterized by fewer employment rights and protections,
making it easier and less costly for employers to ‘hire and fire’ workers (not only immigrants) than in
more regulated labour markets. As is well documented, however, differences in legal status also
translate into inferior working conditions for less privileged workers (e.g. Favell and Recchi 2011).
Optimizing the second option, rights, means fewer regularly employed migrants, since this workforce
tends to be not as cheap and docile. In essence, fewer rights for migrants means an increase in legal-
political inequality in immigration states, although it may decrease economic inequality between
countries and, in certain circumstances, in emigration countries. Yet we need to be aware that the
trade-off between numbers and rights is not simply a social given but is constantly renegotiated
between the actors involved. It is politically constructed, and only works in a world already
characterized by gross inequalities between states in the global North and the global South. Overall,
the rights vs. numbers dilemma significantly advances our understanding of welfare states in the
global North not just as exerting social closure toward the outside and thus upholding economic
asymmetries across the globe. Consideration of this trade-off helps us to reflect upon the ambiguous
relationship of ‘outside’ via exclusion and ‘inside’ via inclusion in which the developmental states of
the global South are also actors in their own right.
Moving from the macro-scale to everyday life, the mobility turn (Urry 2007) has drawn attention
to the nexus of cross-border migration and everyday mobilities—for example, how the initial
relocating move spills over to affect everyday access and mobility after relocation. Seen in this way,
the mobility turn is an effort to generalize the insights of time geography (cf. Hägerstrand 1975). For
migrants most constrained by state migration regimes, their mobilities in the immigration regions are
frequently also the most restricted, for example South Asian workers in the Gulf states (Baldwin-
Edwards 2011). In contrast, transnational elites typically enjoy far wider latitude in their access to
urban amenities and goods, if sometimes self-limited to specific enclaves in global cities and luxury
resorts (e.g. Birtchnell and Caletrí 2014). Yet one needs to make distinctions among the highly
skilled. For example, young professionals mobile in the EU—the ‘Eurostars’—often lack access to
local networks and knowledge (Favell 2008); after all, social capital is first and foremost a local
asset. Such observations allow us to ask questions about a ‘transnational habitus’ (Kelly and Lusis
2006) which is a cross-border frame allowing the bearers of various forms of capital—economic,
social, cultural, symbolic—to convert them into desirable goods.
The question is whether and how groups with different resources, such as financial, social, and
cultural capital, are able to transfer these goods abroad. The question concerns the link between
transnationality as the extent of cross-border transactions on the one hand and social inequalities on
the other (Faist 2014b). Migrants’ transnationality can have quite diverse outcomes: in certain
circumstances, cross-border transactions could be a conduit for the transfer of financial remittances
for the purposes of addressing poverty. For migrants in immigration countries, financial transfers from
home may be used to obtain legal documents, and for those left behind in emigration countries, to pay
tuition fees for children’s schooling. For segregated migrant groups, however, transnational ties may
lead into a mobility trap. At state level, financial remittances may induce remittance-dependent
economies to avoid much-needed structural reforms as money transfers from abroad create space for
the inaction of governments which should otherwise be responsible for balancing current account
deficits (Chapter 9).
Following upon global and transnational perspectives, the subsequent distinction of inequalities in
emigration regions and immigration regions is a purely analytical one. It should be kept in mind that
processes of inequality production and concomitant political conflicts traverse the borders of national
states and regions, as has been highlighted in the literature on cross-border migration (e.g. Piper and
Rother 2011). Therefore, researchers need to consider the various positions migrants and their
significant others may occupy in multiple locations across borders.

Emigration Regions—to Europe

One of the basic insights on the migration–development nexus is deceptively simple: ‘emigration by
itself cannot lead to national economic development’ (J. Taylor et al. 1996: 397). This means that, in
essence, the politico-economic conditions must be right for emigration countries to profit from
emigration. Only under certain conditions does the presence of emigrants abroad increase investment
in the country of origin, both Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and portfolio. And it is only then that
emigrants’ insider advantages in their country of origin contribute to economic growth. Does the same
apply to the migration–inequalities nexus? There are two dimensions to gauging the impact of
migration on emigration regions, namely inequality of what (e.g. income, opportunities) and inequality
of whom (e.g. categories of persons).
The most commonly used indicators for tracing the impact on inequalities are financial remittances
and brain drain. As to remittances, a basic analytical choice researchers make is to look at
remittances either as exogenous, that is, in addition to household income, or as a substitute for
income. In the former case we would expect inequality to decline, in the latter to increase (Black,
Natali, and Skinner 2005). Resource transfers can occur through return—transferring very directly
educational credentials and occupational skills—and/or through transnational ties—involving an
exchange of ideas, social practices, and financial remittances. The impact of remittances (and return
migration) varies whether they are considered on a household, community, or national scale (Beine,
Docquier, and Rapoport 2001). For example, while remittances may play a crucial role for families
with respect to reciprocal social support, national states may use them for gaining foreign currency or
as collateral for loans. Overall, those emigration countries more heavily dependent on remittances
seek to resolve chronic balance-of-payments problems by using them as collateral for foreign loans
(Guarnizo 2003).
In terms of absolute numbers, the more economically advanced countries clearly receive much
more in the way of remittances. This is not surprising, as low-income countries have the lowest
emigration rates to OECD countries. Nonetheless, some low-income countries have a relatively high
dependency on remittances, characteristic of structurally weak economies (Horst et al. 2014). There
is also an important difference between internal and cross-border migration with respect to risks and
rewards: local mobility and circulation within national state borders may decrease the risks involved
but have only a relatively modest effect on the reduction of poverty. Longer-distance and longer-term
migration, ceteris paribus, tends to have a greater relative effect on increasing income and wealth
(Czaika and de Haas 2011). Crucially, such outcomes are filtered by social units in the migration field
such as hometown, religious, ethnic, village, or alumni associations. In West Africa, for example,
Mouride religious associations have ensured that migrant remittances, which come mainly from
Europe, are invested in a wide range of community development projects (Grillo and Riccio 2003).
Often occluded in both academic and political debates are reverse remittances (Mazzucato 2011)
flowing from emigration to immigration regions for the purpose of setting up migrants upon arrival
abroad. Migrants and their significant others are frequently embedded in transnational social spaces
which involve multiple social positions in different locales and countries with respect, for example,
to social status and class. The phenomenon of reverse remittances is all the more important, as the
migration field has changed significantly over the past decades. Especially in South Asia, Southeast
Asia, and East Asia, the costs of migration have risen for low-skilled migrants and forced migrants,
but also for international students (Khadria 2009). Evidence comes from rising death tolls and
disappearance of migrants en route (Andersson 2014); rising migration costs and related indebtedness
of families in sending countries; and the risk of losing considerable investment (e.g. Gammeltoft-
Hansen and Nyberg Sørensen 2013). Overall, these studies suggest that there is much more financial
capital flowing out of the global South than flowing into it.
Among those who migrate, it is those already privileged, those relatively better-off, who win more
with respect to income, wealth, and prestige. That lead was given by a classical study, albeit on
internal rural–urban migration, on 1970s India (Lipton 1980). This insight has also been crucial for
the study of cross-border migration. The main mechanism identified has been Matthew’s Law, that is,
those already higher up in the stratification patterns win most with respect to material and symbolic
resources. Examples are plentiful. For instance, the formal channels for financial remittances, such as
money agencies and banks, remain heavily stacked against poorer migrants because of the high fees
charged in using such channels and the limited access to bank accounts. The effects are much less
clear with informal channels. Yet certain beneficiaries have been identified. In the hundi system, for
the hundiwala, who transfer remittances from destination back to families at origin, this form of
brokerage offers a venue to advance hierarchical status (Rahman and Yeo 2015: 106).
The most clearly identified positive effects of remittances are in the area of poverty reduction.
Remittances alleviate poverty both directly (e.g. Imai et al. 2012), and also indirectly by easing credit
constraints for households and equalizing incomes. At the household level, remittances raise the
standard of living of recipient families and improve children’s education, health, housing, and family
welfare, and thus enhance future human capital development (Gupta, Pattillo, and Wagh 2009).
Beyond that, remittances can also indirectly benefit households that do not receive such transfers
through the increase in the consumption patterns of recipient families which in turn stimulates local
production, job creation, creation of new enterprises or new infrastructures, and which may generally
improve development in the community (Giannetti, Federici, and Raitano 2009).
To make sense of these findings, it is worth remembering that pioneer migrants tend to come from
relatively privileged households in emigration communities and are likely to become even wealthier
compared to the poor who do not have access to migration. The relatively poorer groups among the
potential migrant categories are often restricted to shorter distances. Furthermore, if engaging in
cross-border migration, the poorer frequently have to rely on riskier migration channels, and are thus
pushed into illegality (e.g. Siddiqui 2008 on female migrants from Bangladesh). The more
continuously sustained the migration, however, the more equalizing the effects become (J. Taylor et al.
1996: 408) because network effects, that is, social capital, reduce the costs of cross-border
migration, both materially and psychologically. Selectivity in international migration seems to differ
from that in internal migration. The livelihood literature finds that diversification may act both to
diminish and to accentuate rural inequality. Domestic remittances have an equalizing impact whereas
transnational remittances show disequalizing effects. This is because cross-border migration poses
higher barriers to entry, such as costs for travel, visas, and information, which make it more
accessible to better-off than to poorer households (e.g. on sub-Saharan Africa, F. Ellis 2007: 21).
These findings would suggest a straightforward policy implication: ensure the widest possible access
to (cross-border) migration opportunities for relatively poorer people.
Evidence is abundant on the implications of migration for the connection between group
heterogeneities (caste, ethnicity, gender, transnationality) and social inequalities. Cross-border
migration and transnational ties in Eastern Punjab (Doaba region, India), for example, have been
accompanied by opening agricultural markets in India, and also ecological problems such as sinking
water levels (S. Taylor, Singh, and Booth 2007). For migrants, the cultivation of land has, in a way,
been replaced by the cultivation of transnational ties. Caste hierarchies have been reproduced. First,
due to selectivity of the better-off, migration processes have reinforced closure rules (intermarriage),
contributed to the maintenance of a high degree of physical and occupational segregation, and helped
revive a justifying ideology (Hinduism). Second, within castes, those who remain in Eastern Punjab
have been worse off than those who ventured abroad, with respect to social prestige and honour
(izaat). The contribution of migrants to development projects is seen by non-migrants as serving the
izaat of migrants (cf. Gardner and Osella 2004). Migrants living in transnational social spaces
sometimes engage in conspicuous consumption, transforming economic capital into symbolic capital
(see also Anghel 2016 on Romanian migrants who spent time in Italy). Thus migration has also
resulted in new inequalities, that is, the growing importance of cross-border networks for the
accumulation of and access to material and symbolic resources.
Gender is a crucial heterogeneity whose categorizations imply inequalities. Globally, the
migration of women has gradually shifted from a family reunification trend to a more economically
motivated strategy, in which increasing numbers of women migrate autonomously to work abroad. On
the one hand, there is an argument to be made for the increasing autonomy of women in migration
processes. For example, the departure of men to the USA from Mexico during the 1980s and 1990s
has usually increased control and decision-making autonomy among women left behind, for example
by entry into the labour market in the origin country. Moreover, power relations in households often
did not revert to a male-dominated pattern even after return migration (Goldring 2001). On the other
hand, there are also many contexts in which gender-based inequalities at the family level were
reproduced during migration through continued oppression via gendered spatial segregation. For
example, in Senegalese–French migration in the latter part of the twentieth century, the extended
families in the emigration country chose marriage partners for male migrants and showed no interest
in family reunification. The wives and children stayed with the families of the male migrant to ensure
both the continued flow of financial remittances and the return of the male migrant to the family
abode. In addition, Senegalese migrant associations in France reinforced this social order (Mezger
and Beauchemin 2014). The successful challenge of gendered inequalities seems to call for ingenious
counter-strategies, such as inversion. In Sri Lanka, in the late 1990s, women made up more than 80
per cent of migrants to the Middle East; in Bangladesh a similar proportion were among those moving
to Malaysia. Upon return, many were able to invest in small enterprises such as grocery stalls and
animal husbandry. In order to do so, they had to successfully renegotiate their roles by utilizing those
very same religious discourses and practices which attempt to regulate them. In this case they argued
that there were no religious prohibitions on female entrepreneurial activities (Rogaly et al. 2002;
Thangarajah 2003).
In order to identify the operative social mechanisms, researchers need to tackle methodological
challenges. In some cases migration seems less of a household decision and more of a balancing of
different interests within the household, or indeed as a result of intra-household contestation. This
requires a greater sensitivity towards the impact of migration and transnationality on intra-household
inequalities, notably between men and women, and younger and older generations. In sum, the jury is
still out on the effects of migration on gendered inequalities, with much on-going research focusing on
social protection and employment (Chapters 5 and 6).
In the public sphere, results of migration with respect to political inequalities are mixed. In their
study of migrant transnational politics and democratization processes in the Dominican Republic and
El Salvador, for example, Itzigsohn and Villacrés (2008) found that migrant transnational political
practices in these two countries have been strengthening the formal democratic rules of organizing
political competition. Their analysis also shows, however, that the contribution of migrant return and
transnational politics to the deepening of democracy is limited. Migration from both countries began
in response to authoritarianism, political repression, and the absence of socio-economic
opportunities. Through exit, migrants formed a new constituency to be reckoned with by the rulers in
the countries of emigration. Yet, in the Dominican case, low rates of participation of (return)
migrants, and the fact that the right to vote is seen by most as a symbolic right, diminish the impact of
the migrant vote and confine it to those who work within the established party apparatuses. In the
Salvadoran case, hometown associations have contributed to increased voice through the emergence
of participatory institutions and to the dynamism of local political participation. Beyond these
channels, migrants have become a new and unaccountable power group. They may use their resources
to impose their own agendas on non-migrants—namely, those who have to live with the consequences
of development projects. We should thus be cautious about casting migrants as agents of greater
political equality. Migrants themselves are as likely to be members of local elites as they are of the
opposition to such elites in the diaspora.
One of the research questions not yet addressed systematically is whether the form of (cross-
border) mobility has an impact upon inequalities. A first rough distinction could be made between
temporary and permanent forms of movement: the former is connected to seasonality, cyclical
mobility, and temporariness, the latter to settlement and long-term time horizons. It seems plausible to
inquire into the proposition that temporary—especially seasonal and cyclical—mobility is associated
with the least potential for change because of its temporariness and precariousness. In such instances
inequalities might be (re)produced because these migrants may not be able to acquire transferable
skills, may not have access to beneficial career networks, and might be barred from acquiring
citizenship (for a case study on the Indian information technology industry, see Xiang 2007). These
disadvantages tend to benefit employers in securing a docile migrant labour force.
Some studies depict labour migrants as the proverbial Homo oeconomicus. The implication is that
remittances strengthen existing social stratification in the origin countries and labour market divisions
in the immigration states (Piore 1979). Yet this finding needs to be placed in a temporal sequence:
migrants tend to transition from economic to cultural and political actors over time (Chapter 8). All
told, temporary forms of migration in particular could, apart from their poverty-alleviating effects
(e.g. Gubert, Lassourd, and Mesplé-Somps 2010), consolidate deeper social inequalities. Permanent
migration associated with settlement in immigration countries and the emergence of migrants as
significant cultural-political actors may reach deeper, but here also overall societal change is quite
limited (cf. Alba and Foner 2015). There is little evidence of a deeper impact on class or gender
structures in either emigration or immigration countries.
Around the same time that dependency and world systems approaches appeared in academic and
political debates, ‘brain drain’ also entered the lexicon. The discussion has gone through three
phases. First, the original statements about brain drain posited the idea that the cost of rearing the next
generation of workers is through wages and taxes in the respective country of production (Adams
1968). Migration is a tool to avoid those costs, since the bulk of that rearing occurs either in the rural
areas as with internal migration or in the emigration state in the case of cross-border migration
(Meillassoux 1981). Second, modifying this negative conclusion, NELM introduced the concepts of
‘brain gain’ and ‘brain circulation’ to suggest that the success in emigration of those with higher
education gives an incentive to others to acquire this kind of training (e.g. in the medical profession)
themselves. It has been argued that the migration of skilled professionals such as medical doctors can
even lead to a brain gain as it fosters increased demand for education among the population with the
hope of migrating. Yet, at least according to this claim, not all will eventually migrate, so that the
brain drain can be compensated (Stark 2004). Moreover, remittances from the highly skilled can
provide incentives for skills accumulation among members of recipient households since they
validate the increased rewards associated with migration. Third, more recent discussions have
suggested that brain gain arguments might be valid in the case of countries such as the Philippines
which have adopted a deliberate brain export policy in the case of nurses. This claim, however,
disregards the fact that many of the graduated nurses are unemployed (Mosuela 2018). Also, as in the
case of medical doctors in most of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the capacity of medical schools
to increase their medical student intake is hampered by institutional capacity constraints as well as
the lack of lecturers at universities. If brain drain rises above a certain threshold (e.g. 85 per cent of
all academically trained persons in Haiti have left the country), it is certainly detrimental
(Commander, Kangasniemi, and Winters 2004). Often, studies have linked the brain drain and the
‘brawn drain’ to emigration as a safety valve: in the case of migration of the so-called low-skilled, it
has acted as a safety valve for those economically and socially adversely affected by austerity
policies and above all neo-liberally inspired economic and social policies over the past decades.
The exit of the so-called highly skilled who constitute the bulk of political opposition activists may
reinforce the position of the already privileged (for additional exit-voice scenarios, see Pedraza
2013).
In sum, migration often does indeed benefit migrants, albeit to varying degrees. Yet because of the
highly selective nature of migration, it does not substantially alter inequalities, including power
structures, in countries of origin. Migration has an impact on social change but does not contribute to
social transformation of inequalities of caste, ethnicity, or even class. In short, migration is not the
great equalizer when it comes to the deeper effects of social inequalities. In the long-term
perspective, however, poorer sections in the social stratification order are not simply losers under all
conditions. A caveat has to be added: poorer and better-off potential and actual cross-border
migrants, especially those from the global South to the global North, are already a rather small
minority of the world’s population when it comes to their position in the global stratification system.
Cross-border migration from periphery to centre in fact is a phenomenon mostly confined to the upper
world quintile, that is, movement within the richest 20 per cent of the world, measured by income
(Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009: chapter 2).
Immigration Regions in Europe
While the impact of migration on inequalities is hotly debated with respect to regions of emigration,
the picture for regions of immigration is clearer: overall, these regions as a whole definitely stand to
gain from immigration. But who exactly and which groups in particular carry which costs and enjoy
which benefits via which mechanisms? Part of the answer with respect to immigration regions is
simple: control and numbers matter. Migration in OECD countries is usually tightly controlled and the
relative share of migrants as part of labour markets and welfare state systems in immigration
countries of the global North is rather low. Were it to rise much higher, large-scale detrimental effects
could ensue, such as the dissolution of employer associations and labour unions, wage depression,
and other negative consequences (Faist 1997).
On the aggregate, national level, immigration from other EU countries and from outside the EU
tend to economically benefit countries of destination (Dustmann and Frattini 2014; Ruist 2014).
However, there are negative implications on the local level (YE 2014). As to winners and losers,
from a politico-economic perspective, the consequences for various groups have often been
compared. The dominant view seems to be that employers and the better-off benefit from the
immigration of the lower-skilled, and that it is the lower-paid native workers who are disadvantaged
(cf. Dancygier and Laitin 2014). However, there are three reasons to doubt this conclusion. First,
labour markets are usually segmented. Migrants often compete with other migrants who arrived
earlier. In this case migration has no effect on the wages and rates of employment of native
populations. Second, it has often been observed that there is no direct competition between migrants
and natives because the latter leave the sectors in which they expect competition with migrants.
Moreover, certain jobs are not attractive to natives who have access to better options for making a
living. Third, migrants offer services from which poorer natives benefit—for example, small tailoring
shops engaging in alterations. All in all, these considerations suggest that segmentation in labour
markets and self-employment are major mechanisms both reproducing and ameliorating inequalities
with respect to poorer natives and migrants: while segmentation slots low-skilled migrants into less
desirable positions for natives, it is the mechanism of opportunity hoarding that allows migrants to
engage in gainful self-employment.
A perspective based on the cultural turn emphasizes the performative role of language in
producing dichotomous categorizations. In other words, the very categorization of mobile persons
underlies the production of social inequalities via semantic boundary construction as a major social
mechanism. For example, the past few decades have witnessed the relentless emergence of new
categories, such as forced migrants (violently displaced persons, yet falling outside the Geneva
Convention), climate migrants, climate refugees, and transit migrants. In short, ever increasing in-
between categories have been used in an endless stream of categorizations. One of the crucial divides
in academia as well as in politics has been the emerging distinction between migration and mobility.
While migration sometimes refers to movement from periphery to core regions, mobility connotes
movements within a single or between different core regions. In Europe, for example, the former
refers to migration from third countries to the EU and from peripheral EU countries to richer ones; the
latter to movement within the EU, especially between core countries (Boswell and Geddes 2010). In
this case, we observe a top-down approach to categorization, which thus can be seen as an example
of power shaping the ways people think and categorize. Such asymmetric dichotomies not only mirror
but also construct semantic inequalities (Franquesa 2011). Research from this perspective seeks to
demonstrate how such categorizations systematically concatenate into mobility regimes which
regulate patterns of cross-border movement. This requires a focus on how mobility is patterned by,
and in turn becomes part of, hegemonic power relations, for example, based on the Foucaultian notion
of ‘pastoral power’ which examines how ruling ideas and framings become dominant less through
coercion than through the consent and self-discipline of those governed (Geiger and Pécoud 2013).
It should always be borne in mind that the national state makes constant use of hard power to
selectively enforce borders. A linguistic analysis by itself would therefore be insufficient to capture
the emergence and (re)production of mobility and migration regimes. Nonetheless, it can be shown by
semantic categorizations that some issues appear on the radar, while others get occluded. A case in
point is the human rights discourse of the IOM in Argentina during the 1990s, which made human
trafficking and irregular migration extremely visible but made invisible social and labour rights
abuses (Basok, Piper, and Simmons 2013). Another example concerns ‘triple win’ scenarios (e.g.
GCIM 2005), according to which ‘migration management’ has the potential to benefit all involved,
namely emigration countries, immigration countries, and migrants. Even if such proclamations were
empirically true, they forget about those who are left behind in emigration countries and thus obscure
the distribution of the costs and benefits of migration (Parreñas 2005).
From a political sociology perspective the fundamental factor creating dichotomous
categorizations—first and foremost that between citizen and non-citizen/foreigner—is what one could
call a welfare paradox. The principles of liberal economies call for the opening of borders for
capital, goods, services, and people in the economic sphere. At the same time, the principles of
political communities and of the protection of social rights in welfare states demand some closure
against the outside, thus enforcing a logic of inclusion/exclusion of newcomers (G. Freeman 1986)—
often embodied in citizenship as a mechanism of social closure and exclusiveness toward the outside
and thus non-members, but inclusiveness toward its citizens. What is at stake may not just be social
rights but also the politics of collective (national) identities, as political debates and conflicts on
multiple citizenship in Europe suggest (Faist 2007). It is the differential granting of rights by the state
based on different entry categories, such as the temporary and permanent residency permit, that leads
to civic stratification. This is particularly interesting in the case of the structured differentiation of
non-citizen migrants into categories such as permanent vs. temporary residence or legal vs. illegal
residence status (Morris 2002).
What makes this constellation more complex is a principle in tension with dichotomous (legal)
categorizations, the ‘liberal paradox’ (cf. Hollifield 1992). On the one hand national states tend to be
open with respect to market exchange but on the other hand distinguish between citizens and
foreigners through social closure. While social closure via border control and citizenship might be
considered necessary to achieve a modicum of socio-economic equality and (full) political equality
among full members (citizens), migrants—especially settled ones—even though they are not citizens,
cannot be totally excluded from enjoying certain civil and social rights, certainly a consequence of the
rights revolution since the 1970s.
A prominent example of the relevance of norms of equality is the increasing tendency to interpret
social rights as human rights. Indeed, one could argue that social rights have been increasingly
conceived as human rights (Chapters 2 and 4). The strategies of the ILO are a case in point: rights to
basic protection against the vagaries of labour market participation are seen as human rights (ILO
1998). Another meaningful starting point for considering the transnationalized social question,
besides human rights standards, is the classic debate on social citizenship, because cross-border
connectivity and interdependencies are also reflected within national and local political entities. T.
H. Marshall (1992 [1949]) viewed nationally institutionalized social citizenship as a possible means
of reducing the risks ensuing from market participation and market exclusion, and as an egalitarian
status concomitant with full membership in a national society. It is an empirical question, though,
whether and to what extent the norms of citizenship beyond notions of national welfare state
citizenship serve as an orientation. To the extent that supranational bodies such as the EU become
polities, they are also faced with the importance of providing social protection and addressing gross
social inequalities: ‘Nor are political rights and political principles the dominant preoccupation of
the contemporary world. The statement often, and justly, made that the future of democracy depends
on its ability to solve the problem of full employment illustrates the subordination of political to
social and economic ends in the modern world. Internationalism, like nationalism, must become
social’ (Carr 1945: 63). Yet the exploration of what has been called the ‘international social question’
(Bobbio 1996: 60, 82) or what is called here the transnationalized social question has barely
commenced (see also Fischer-Lescano and Möller 2016).
The provision of rights for citizens and non-citizens has tangible results. Many democratic
national states have moved from the predominant ius sanguinis rules to more inclusive access to
citizenship for long-term residents and the children of non-citizen immigrants. For example, Germany
complemented ius sanguinis with ius soli elements in 2000. The Gulf countries attest to the fact that
this trend is far from universal. Such political factors may influence migration patterns in important
ways. Citizenship policies and radical right parties influence the choice of destination among
migrants (Fitzgerald, Leblang, and Teets 2014).
Moving from political rights to social stratification, one of the crucial questions is to what extent
patterns of inequalities have changed as a result of immigration. Unlike the early twentieth century in
the USA and the 1960s in Europe, where immigrants entered mostly at the bottom of the class or
stratification system (Castles and Kosack 1973), nowadays immigrants add even more to all strata:
capitalists, petty entrepreneurs, and high-, low-, and semi-skilled labour migrants. In the Europe of
the 1960s and 1970s, recruitment of labour migrants from former colonies helped propel economic
expansion without making much of a dent in the deeper structure of inequality. What took place was a
major process of sub-stratification: migrants took on positions at the very bottom of employment
hierarchies, so that native workers could move upward in a sort of ‘elevator effect’ (Beck 1992).
This meant that people in most employment categories experienced improvements in their living
conditions and they perceived these improvements as much more important than the inequalities
which still existed. Nowadays, the elevator effect seems to have largely disappeared, without
massive competition between labour migrants and native workers, although migrants have contributed
to the supply of low-wage labour as unskilled and semi-skilled workers (Portes 1997). In both time
periods, upward social mobility of migrants seems to have occurred without deeper changes in class
structure, although with significant differences to be sure. In Europe’s post-Second World War
economic boom period, social mobility was a characteristic of both immigrant and native workers.
From the 1980s onwards, in both Europe and North America, social mobility of highly skilled
migrants was apparent, whereas it was not as clear-cut for other categories. For capitalists,
immigrant workers usually have increased labour supply and flexibility, occasionally lowered labour
costs, and often increased the docility of the labour force (Castles and Kosack 1973).
As to gender as a key heterogeneity involved in the (re)production of social inequalities, migrant
women often face the double disadvantage of being immigrants and female. Low-skilled or unskilled
migrant women tend to find jobs in a limited number of occupations in the service sector, often
shunned by native workers, with gender-associated roles such as cleaning and catering services,
entertainment, and care-giving (Chapters 5 and 6). Overall, it is fruitful to look at points at which the
categorizations of heterogeneities intersect (e.g. Lutz 2010). For example, it has been shown that
gender inequalities look very different when class and ethnicity are introduced, and gender
disadvantage is most clearly felt among the working class and among certain groups to which ethnic
traits are ascribed and self-ascribed (Donato et al. 2006).
Social inequalities matter insofar as they are (il)legitimate, as understood in a Weberian way, and
(not) contested. In an abstract manner, the norms of equality are part of the processes legitimizing
inequalities. The question is precisely which values and norms are drawn upon by the various actors
involved. For example, there has been a disjunction between public opinion and economic analysis.
Many opinion polls across Europe have established over the past few decades that a majority or
strong minority of respondents holds the view that immigrants take jobs away from the native born or
at least reduce their wages (e.g. Fetzer 2000). To the contrary, many economists and policy analysts
point to empirical evidence that immigration in fact neither reduces native workers’ wages nor
increases their unemployment rates. In a nutshell, majority academic opinion holds that any negative
impacts of immigration on wage and employment rates are modest at most, and that immigration is
slightly beneficial to long-term economic growth and competitiveness of immigration countries (cf.
Fischer, Martin, and Straubhaar 1997). One interpretation of the perception of immigrants as
economic (and cultural) threats is that it reflects a growing divide between those benefiting from
transnationalization (i.e. globalization) and those who feel left behind. The consequence of that divide
would be the latter’s opposition to visible signs of cross-border transactions, such as migration and
migrants. In this perspective migration would serve as a ‘meta-issue’ which politicians and voters
could blame for many ills, ranging from unemployment, scarcity of housing, and cultural alienation
(Faist 1994). Another interpretation is migration-specific, looking at the asymmetric way in which the
benefits and costs of the migratory process are distributed in immigration countries—the private gains
and the public costs (G. Freeman 1995). While the economic benefits of migration are mainly private
(primarily, although not solely, captured by capitalists), the costs are socialized (as long as they
impact access to public services and educational institutions). Part of the citizenry feels threatened
with potential losses. To connect this latter interpretation to the former, restrictive responses by the
electorate, usually fuelled and exploited by right-wing nationalism, point to inequalities related to
migration such as fear of growing cultural diversity, but also to factors not directly related to cross-
border migration such as loss of trust in political elites (e.g. de la Torre 2015) and economic
modernization (Chapter 8).
This issue points to the question: when does inequality related to the migration field become an
object of political struggle? It seems that this occurs not only when obvious costs and benefits are at
stake, but also when migration is tied to globalization, the critique of political elites, and what are
perceived as social problems. In immigration, social inequalities are not only contentious because of
increasing market liberalization (e.g. the competition for ‘the best and brightest’ migrants, Kapur and
McHale 2005) which leads to increased national state competition for human-power as an expression
of increased market liberalization, undergirded by the idea of autonomous liberal subjects (cf. Soysal
2012). In addition to market liberalization, inequalities among migrants and between migrants and
natives are also manifest in the close link between immigration and securitization, namely the ways
through which migration and immigrants come to be perceived as a threat to national identities and
national interests (Noxolo and Huysmans 2009).

Beyond Labour and Inequalities: Cross-Border Mobility of Economic Elites

The reproduction of inequalities in cross-border migration is well exemplified by the mobility of
upper classes. The social question of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was characterized
by the spatial mobility of masses of people from the countryside into the industrializing centres.
Millions of people traversed Europe but also engaged in intercontinental mobility. Similar mass
movements occurred in South and Southeast Asia and, as a form of internal migration in Russia, into
Siberia (McKeown 2008). Yet even then it was not only the downtrodden seeking a better life but
also businesspeople and members of political and cultural elites who moved across borders. At the
same time we also saw the emergence of nationally bounded bourgeoisies. Here, the focus is on
economic elites. In a broad way, economic elites can be characterized by three interacting features:
first, high returns on single or varied sources of income (wealth, work, alimentation) in conjunction
with a dominant position in markets (finance, goods, labour); second, a dominant position of power
with a high potential to shape public politics; and third, exclusive social status combined with a
common lifestyle (cf. Carroll 2010).
The mobility of economic elites is higher than that of the average population; hence it is a crucial
group. We can use two standards of comparison—average global mobility and the stock of
immigrants in major immigration countries. While overall global mobility including all strata is about
3 per cent on average (Chapter 1), the mobility of the top elite is much higher, about 12–13 per cent
among the top managerial class (based on data presented in Hartmann 2016). And although
comparisons to average stocks of migrants are to be taken with great caution, it is safe to say that the
stock of foreign board members and chief executive officers (CEOs) is, on average, higher than the 5
to 10 per cent of the immigrant workforce in OECD countries. From a social structural point of view
the degree of transnationality matters. As of now, systematic studies that employ sophisticated
network analytical methods have not yet yielded plausible answers (Burris and Staples 2012: 324).
Two of the main problems are that, first, it is often merely ties between companies and persons
linking companies that are analysed and not ties between persons. Second, there is no clear threshold
given as to how dense the ties must be in order to speak of a cohesive social group across borders.
Nonetheless, there is some evidence concerning the mobility of economic elites, specifically
owners and top executives of the biggest companies in selected OECD countries (Hartmann 2016).
Among board members of companies, the mobility varies much (here, mobility refers to living in a
country other than the seat of the respective company). In some it is relatively high, such as Germany,
the UK, and the Netherlands, with figures around 25 per cent. This figure is even higher among non-
executive board members. And among CEOs, about one-eighth hail from abroad on average. Yet, we
should keep in mind that there is also wide variation, ranging between 72 per cent in Switzerland and
zero per cent in China.1 The middle range is noteworthy, with figures ranging between 15 and 30 per
cent in Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden. The degree of transnationality is even higher
among CEOs who have some work experience abroad: about 23 per cent entertain a high intensity of
contacts abroad, acquired mostly in the frame of an intra-company career. Not surprisingly, the degree
of transnationality correlates positively with the size of the company. Another category among the
economic elite is wealth billionaires. Again, there is a wide variation: about one-fourth to one-third
of billionaires from Germany, Sweden, France, Canada, and Israel have moved their place of
residence abroad. By contrast, the percentage is close to zero for billionaires from China, Japan,
South Korea, the Philippines, the USA, Turkey, and Chile. Understandably, the highest percentage is
found among rentiers. It is much lower among those who direct companies, the latter needing to be in
situ. Wealth billionaires constitute only one category among the financially rich. Many wealth
billionaires are not simply rentiers but ‘working rich’ (Saez 2015), that is, highly paid top executives
and entrepreneurs.
Beyond mobility, the cross-border communication patterns among economic elites are instructive.
There is only one country in the world that exposes a thoroughly transnationalized economic elite:
Switzerland (Bühlmann, David, and Mach 2012). Nonetheless, with respect to the top management of
big companies, there are at least two clusters in which economic elites are relatively more
transnationalized than in the rest of the world—and more transnational than the average population.
The first cluster consists of selected Commonwealth states, comprising the UK, Canada, and
Australia; and the second is a north-west European axis, namely Germany, the Netherlands, and the
UK. It is remarkable that economic elites in France, the USA, China, and Japan do not follow such
patterns.
In addition to communication across the borders of national states, it is crucial to look at economic
nodes, such as global cities and economic sectors. Networks among economic elites can be traced
back for centuries. Suffice it to say that in the early twentieth century, most evidence suggests,
regional networks with economic nodes were important—for example, between entrepreneurs in
Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague. Nowadays, we can discern the growth of transnational
networks with local nodes. A study based on five million enterprises worldwide (Heemskerk et al.
2016) found that companies in London, for example, communicate much more intensively and
extensively with cities abroad than within the UK. This can be seen when looking at the degree of
board interlocks, that is, shared board memberships. All of this implies that an approach firmly
grounded in network analysis points toward the insight that it is not the positions occupied by
economic elites as such, for instance board membership, which are of prime importance. Instead, it is
the positionality within networks and cliques that counts. This requires an examination of not only the
positions economic elites take in a particular location but the ties in between the hubs (e.g. cities) and
nodes (e.g. persons, companies). In sum, in addition to spatial mobility, we need to look at the density
and intensity of communication—and, crucial for the nexus between migration and inequalities, issues
of ideology and consciousness.
There may be a correlation between the degree of transnationality, on the one hand, and a common
(perhaps cosmopolitan?) consciousness on the other. Whatever the causalities implied, a common
consciousness is a hallmark of a class for itself which connotes a feeling of commonality. It is exactly
here that ideology comes in. Göran Therborn concludes in What does the Ruling Class do When it
Rules? that dominant ideologies derive their importance not so much as legitimization that the lower
classes should serve the upper classes. Instead, their primary function would be to act as an element
of social cohesion among the upper class itself (Therborn 1978). This is why ‘single linkers’ who
serve on the boards of companies in various countries could be brokers who link across ‘structural
holes’ (Burt 1992). Global business networks are mainly brokered by financial institutions, suggesting
that this category enjoys wide political and ideological leverage and even control (Vitali et al. 2011).

The Reproduction of Social Inequalities in Emigration and Immigration Contexts

Whether cross-border migration is connected to change in the social structure and social inequalities
in fields such as the economy, politics, and culture is a question that bundles the foregoing
considerations. One may argue that migration itself represents social change that can potentially lead
to further societal shifts in both countries of origin and destination. The issue at stake is the initiation
of profound transformation in society triggered by incoming migrants.
 Changes triggered by cross-border migration are important because they have structural
importance. Yet this does not necessarily imply social transformation but mainly minimal alterations
of the social order, because social values and the social structure of the destination countries remain
mostly unaffected (Portes 2010: 1548). One may contend that the potential of migration to initiate
deep social change is limited, because a dense institutional landscape in which profound ‘cultural and
power arrangements’ are embedded would hinder them (Entzinger 2009). Consequently, migrants are
channelled into certain social status positions. Similarly, in source countries emigration tends to
reinforce the existing social and political order and therefore does not transform it. As we have seen,
emigration as an economic strategy that potentially eases political opposition usually has allowed
political elites to preserve their social positions. Financial remittances then compensate some
structural deficiencies (e.g. absence of local credit) and help support the emigration region’s
economy. In contrast to temporary or circular forms of movement, permanent migration is seen as
especially favourable for far-reaching transformations. Negative forms of migration-induced changes
can include the depopulation of emigration regions, which may involve the outflow of valuable
cognitive and productive human skills and undermine the demographic foundation of local
development (Delgado Wise, Covarrubias, and Puentes 2013). In the field of politics, emigrants
exercising voice from abroad through diaspora can at times be instrumental for regime change,
although in such a case the diaspora has to be seen as but one element among others influencing such
change (Shain 2005). Finally, the reason far-reaching change potentials are greater in societies of
origin than in countries of destination is associated with the uneven distribution of economic and
political power, technology, and representation in international institutions, which favours countries
of destination and makes them more resilient against the influences that immigration implies.
Another perspective on the reproduction of social inequalities emphasizes gender, ethnicity, and
class as significant traits that need to be considered in the study of drivers and consequences in the
transformation and migration issue. This perspective emphasizes political and economic restructuring
within neo-liberal globalization via market liberalization, deregulation, and reregulation, which
affects a large number of households of less-developed countries and leads to many job losses,
particularly among female workers, which consequently triggers the outmigration of women. In turn,
emigration would potentially ‘lead to shifting identities and new complex forms of gender’ (Munck
2009: 1234), indicating the possible changes with implications for social inequalities triggered by
cross-border migration.
Both ethnicity and gender need to be considered as particularities of the global economy (Balibar
and Wallerstein 1991; see also Boatcă 2015). Ethnicization and sexism serve in countries of
destination as mechanisms for maximizing profits, minimizing production costs, and reducing costs
incurred by labour force protests. Similar to the idea on the structural importance of migrants for
destination countries, from this angle migration induces shifts in the economies of destination
countries, because ethnicization and sexism as profit strategies are likely to transform labour market
conditions. A current example can be found in the subcontract worker schemes in destination
countries such as Germany, Belgium, and France, which represent mostly flexible and low-paid
occupations (Chapter 5). In contrast to the regular labour market, in which workers of a different
ethnic origin made up about 10 per cent in 2015, the percentage of migrants in subcontract jobs in
Germany amounted in the same year to 24 per cent, meaning that every fourth employee involved in
these precarious occupations was a migrant worker (Federal Office for Employment 2016).
Subcontracting illustrates how capitalist strategies can change labour markets through their
segmentation, in which the migrant labour force plays a crucial role (Reich, Gordon, and Edwards
1973). It can furthermore be argued that the factor of ethnicity can not only introduce a changing
division of labour, but also lead to circumstances in which xenophobic and racist discourse and
attitudes might increase in destination countries, because migrants might be singled out as a threat to
national security and national identity. The current strengthening of right-wing movements in reaction
to the influx of refugees among all the EU member states suggests that migrants can be successfully
portrayed as a menace to the fair distribution of scare resources in society, such as jobs, public
goods, and social benefits, and also as a threat to a presumed cultural homogeneity (Chapter 8).
Finally, migrants’ social class affiliation can also be involved in the production of new patterns of
socio-economic inequalities. From this angle, an expression of the ‘new international division of
labour’ (Fröbel, Heinrichs, and Kreve 1980) is the discursive division into high-skilled and low-
skilled migration as well as forced labour migration. In this case forced migration is not limited to the
consequences of physical violence through, for example, armed conflict, but occurs in the context of
structural violence which is exerted by economic processes, such as displacement from rural
agriculture. One may go so far as to argue that forced migration ‘not only survived, but reproduced
and even expanded while the capitalist mode of production…becomes dominant’ (Munck 2009:
1235) in all parts of the world, on the way to a truly integrated world market. These structuralist
interpretations suggest how labour force demands in OECD countries can shape South–North
migrations. They also indicate the ways in which migration is structured by the social class
background of migrants, and how distinctions on the demand side create additional layers of
stratification. One of the least researched areas is the mobility of elites. The transnationality of
economic elites in certain sectors, such as the financial, gives us some cues as to their influence on
ideology and politics.

Outlook: Reinforcing Durable Inequalities

Overall, cross-border migration both constitutes a path to upward social mobility for migrants, their
significant others, and sometimes those left behind, and—at the same time—tends to reinforce
‘durable inequalities’ (Tilly 1998) on a deeper level, such as power relations and inequalities
derived by categorizations of heterogeneities such as gender, ethnicity, caste, and class, none of which
is fundamentally transformed in emigration and immigration regions and in transnational social
spaces. In addition, new inequalities arise, such as the growth of subcontracting in labour markets of
destination regions.
It is important to explore cross-border migration as a strategic research site for understanding
epochal changes of social inequalities. It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2012 [1754]) who famously
argued that inequalities do not arise from natural conditions but from moral considerations and are
thus socially constituted. This view has been given credence since the French Revolution by the rise
of norms of equality—various human and citizen rights—which have patterned political life in
national states but increasingly also beyond. The norms of equality which serve as a yardstick in
perceiving and measuring inequalities stand in stark tension with the ever-present forms of
naturalizing inequalities which tend to produce essentialized categories of people. Norms of equality
and corresponding social rights and social standards are particularly visible in the world of social
protection.
Note
1. According to the KOF globalization index (https://www.kof.ethz.ch/en/forecasts-and-indicators/indicators/kof-globalisation-
index.html), Switzerland is among the ten most highly economically globalized countries in the world, along with Ireland, the
Netherlands, Belgium, Singapore, and Austria (2015). The USA, Japan, Germany, and the People’s Republic of China occupy middle
positions. Those most highly globalized usually have smaller internal markets. In other words, it also depends on the size of the
internal market.
Part II
Inequalities in Social Protection

In the nineteenth century the social question was the central subject of extremely volatile political
conflicts between the ruling classes and working-class movements in Europe, North America, and
Australia. In Europe, nationally bounded welfare states were one of the main responses to such
developments which thus turned into ‘frozen conflicts’ (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). Concomitantly, the
regulation of cross-border migration on the immigration side became tied to welfare state logics.
Issues of resource redistribution and national identity which were important also before the advent of
welfare states were now linked to social security (i.e. social protection)—that is, strategies to cope
with social risks arising in capitalist economies in fields such as employment, health care, and
education. After the Second World War and with the beginning of the Cold War, the functional
equivalent of the welfare state was promised by the national development state, at least in parts of the
world engaged in decolonization (Rist 1996), later to be followed by policy prescriptions that
favoured market and local community principles and local state policies over national state
intervention.
A caveat needs to be added: social protection measures are important in generating and
ameliorating inequalities, but other social and economic policies, such as tax policies and anti-
discrimination measures, would need to be considered to receive a fuller picture. Examples of the
latter include programmes against caste-based discrimination in India or HIV-positive persons in
South Africa (Roelen, Sabates-Wheeler, and Devereux 2016: 234). Here, social protection is
discussed because it stands for a historically and contemporaneously crucial response to addressing
risks which tend to result in creating and maintaining social inequalities between groups and the
politics around them.
To go from national through supranational to global policy as a unified frame would simply be
replacing one container with another. Instead, any analysis going beyond and beneath the national
state needs to be multi-scalar, including local, regional, national, and global elements (Faist 2012).
The most general perspective proceeds on a world scale—the global social policy approach (Deacon
1997). This perspective looks at how international norms, regulations, and practices affect national
and local social policy and protection. It is a transnational diffusion perspective. Ultimately,
substantive global social policy would require an ever-growing cosmopolitan social solidarity as a
basis not only for regulation but also for redistribution. In a preliminary way, one might classify EU
social policy as a regional expression of global social policy. While this perspective constitutes an
advance over the first in considering cross-border transactions (albeit mostly of states and non-NGOs
only), it needs to be supplemented with a view that focuses also on the interstices of various
geographical units in transnational social spaces. It would be of little use simply and primarily to
extol the virtues of the emerging horizon of global social protection without considering the fact that
efforts at social protection take place primarily in complex local, national, and cross-border
entanglements.
Chapter 4 offers the details of a global perspective that focuses mostly on state-provided
protection and concomitant social rights, followed by Chapter 5 on social protection in the European
setting. Chapter 6 then moves on to the scale of family and kinship in transnational social spaces,
connecting Europe and its neighbours or periphery (Germany, Poland, Turkey, Kazahkstan) in order to
unearth how social inequalities are implicated in social protection from below. The conclusions that
can be drawn from Part II are crucial for an understanding of the politics around social protection and
inequalities analysed later in this volume. What requires attention is a phenomenon we could call a
transnational or transnationalized puzzle: while many inequalities may be produced in the context of
cross-border transactions, much of the response is local and national, always embedded in
transnational social spaces.
4

Social Rights and Social Standards in Cross-Border

Migration

Increased geographical mobility, ageing societies, and transformations in social provisions

worldwide give rise to new questions about social protection, which is defined as resources at the
disposal of persons to handle social risks that might impede the realization of their life chances as
defined by various international (UN and European) conventions. Social protection includes a variety
of aspects such as care, necessary information about employment, education, health, legal
frameworks, and material resources that combine public provisions as well as non-state
organizational and interpersonal resources. Depending on the different positions of persons with
regard to their access and use of a variety of protective resources, social inequalities might persist or
new ones might emerge.
The establishment of sanctionable global social norms in the form of cross-border social rights
and social citizenship may be a distant but not unrealizable goal, given the potentially mobilizing
force of a politics of rights and obligations. For the time being, however, no such comprehensive
regime is in sight. Akin to policy regimes governing cross-border migration, including refugee
movements, there are, nevertheless, elements of a global social protection regime, expressed in not
only international conventions on social standards but also rules of national states and social
protection arrangements extended on the scale of families and kinship. In light of the insights gained in
the previous analysis (Chapter 3), cross-border migration exemplifies the ways in which social
protection reproduces social inequalities even though many migrants experience upward social
mobility. The argument here is that although there is no global governance of social protection more
generally and in cross-border migration more specifically, there are assemblages of policy elements
in the form of social standards which are conducive to maintaining social inequalities both on a
systemic-institutional and on a social-relational scale.
Asking about migration and social protection requires a transnational approach with a global
reach for at least two reasons. First, it is essential to understand the worldwide transnational
diffusion of norms which are appealed to by various actors when debating social protection and
migration in public national and international spheres. Much of the governance is guided by the multi-
scalar interplay of soft international norms and national regulations; in the case of the EU also
including supranational rules. Second, much of cross-border migration has transnational elements that
connect destination regions in Europe to most of the world (see Liu 2018 for a fusion of
transnationalization and world polity theories). For example, remittances—quite often used for social
protection purposes such as education and health—signify connections established by migrants and
their significant others between destination, transit, and origin regions, concatenating in transnational
social spaces.
The first part of this chapter describes the assemblages of social protection, encompassing state-
sponsored schemes, services extended by civil society organizations and companies, and also social
protection prevalent in kinship groups. The second part asks how to conceptualize social security and
inequalities through a transnational lens on the background of global norms of equal human rights. The
third part portrays the various social spaces of protection around the globe, examining a range of
forms of institutionalized social protection on various levels. Cross-border migration connects these
various social spaces and thus serves as an ideal site to highlight the role location and membership
play for life chances. After portraying the governance of social standards, the fourth part turns to
descriptions of the elements of global governance of cross-border migration. The fifth part covers
existing transnational social standards in the realm of migration—for example, the International
Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families
(1990). The sixth part examines how far the cross-border regulation of social protection reaches. It
concludes that states’ concern for migration control trumps considerations on social protection that
would allow for the universal cross-border portability of benefits.

Assemblages of Social Protection

Formalized and state-based schemes of social protection outside the established welfare states in the
global North have undergone dramatic change over the past decades. Up until the 1980s most policies
aimed to extend the Bismarckian or other European models of state-based social protection.
International organizations such as the ILO promoted employment-based social insurance according
to ‘minimum standards’ (e.g. Human Resources Development Recommendation R195, ILO 2004).
However, there have been clear limits to this overall strategy. Not surprisingly, most people in the
states of the global South are not protected. In the global South, most often, it is mainly state
employees who are covered by some sort of social insurance. Beginning with the structural
adjustment policies of the late 1970s, both insurance-based schemes and indirect social assistance,
such as subsidies for food, education, and transportation, have come under attack. In the last two
decades of the twentieth century the ‘scorecard’ with respect to life expectancy, infant and child
mortality, old age protection, and schooling has been negative. What has occurred is that more and
more persons are not classified as living in absolute poverty; however, the threshold used has been
mainly income at an extremely low level (Pritchett 2003). In short, poverty reduction did not occur to
the degree envisioned by the UN Millennium Development Goals (Weisbrot et al. 2011). This
development draws attention to what is sometimes called informal social protection—grounded in
families, kinship, and mutual associations.
It must be pointed out that the reduction of social protection programmes in the global South in the
wake of the enforcement of neo-liberal policies by international organizations such as the IMF and
national governments was later followed by a partial reorientation of international organizations.
These began to push for rights-based social protection to cater to a subsection of those in need of
social protection, to poor and vulnerable populations (Devereux and Solórzano 2016). However,
these social protection programmes narrowed into schemes to combat poverty. Many programmes
focused on bringing people out of poverty (the ‘graduation model’). However, the focus on poverty
programmes has not compensated for a comprehensive approach and has not changed the overall
importance of kinship-based social protection.
Seen from a cross-border perspective, there are three ideal/typical ways to provide
institutionalized social protection, such as health insurance (Holzmann, Koettl, and Cheretsky 2005).
First, there is an origin-country model in which agents in the country of origin offer insurance for both
emigrants and their relatives remaining at home. Second, there is a destination model which means
that the insurer in the country of immigration covers risks, mostly in the host country. And, third, there
is a hybrid model which entails covering risks on both sides (Lafleur and Lizin 2015). In addition to
social rights, which—through bilateral agreements and supranational regulations—ensure the
(partial) portability of benefits,1 there are social standards based on international conventions.
No matter which of these three models or a mix thereof is operative, we may distinguish four
realms of provision with respect to cross-border aspects of social protection, namely, states, markets,
civil society, and families. The provision of social security through these four domains occurs
predominantly in the public sphere, governed by codified rules, while families provide social
protection mostly through channels such as monetary remittances or unpaid care (Chapter 6). Social
protection is often ‘patchwork’ social protection (de Jong 2005) or an assemblage which combines
different realms (e.g. state and families), various resources (e.g. money, personal care), different
circles of significant others (e.g. family, friends, social services), and different legal systems (e.g.
emigration and immigration state or both). This portfolio of options emerging from such protection
patchworks or assemblages may include livelihood strategies, like saving schemes (Bilecen 2017),
and state-provided social protection, such as cash transfers; and many other options can be observed
(Lachenmann 1996; Midgley 1984; Mingot and Mazzucato 2017; Figure 4.1). This field of social
protection reaches from more relational aspects on the scale of families and Hometown Associations
(HTAs) to systemic features visible in bi- and multilateral agreements between countries; and from
friendship networks with a low degree of formalization to kinship groups or state-led policies with
high degrees of formalization.
Figure 4.1. Formalization and scales in cross-border social protection.
Source: Thomas Faist, ‘Transnational Social Protection in Europe: A Social Inequality Perspective’, Oxford Development Studies,
45(1) (2017), p. 22; © International Development Centre, Oxford, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd,
http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of International Development Centre, Oxford.

The main elements of state-led provision are social insurance, whether tax-financed or
contribution-based, against the risks of, for example, unemployment, ill health, disability, old age, or
poverty. Also of importance in this realm is social assistance, usually tax-based for those unable to
support themselves, and labour market interventions designed to promote employment (van Ginneken
1999), nowadays mostly called ‘activation policies’ in the EU. Harmonized policies across borders
encompass bilateral agreements between states or supranational (EU) regulations concerning social
insurance, such as the export of benefits to another country. National welfare states and supranational
structures are ‘sharing spaces’ (Ferrera 2008), in which commodification (i.e. the marketization of
labour power) is partially countered by de-commodification through social rights (i.e. the possibility
of earning income outside the market sphere). An example of this view is the classical rendition by T.
H. Marshall who viewed nationally institutionalized social citizenship as a possible means of
reducing the risks ensuing from market participation and market exclusion, and as an egalitarian status
concomitant with full membership in a national society (Marshall 1992 [1949]). This portrayal of
national welfare states is inadequate for many countries of migrant origin to the EU where the state
covers only certain aspects of social protection and considers only select groups such as state
employees. Sometimes, states even constitute a source of insecurity for life and protection (Gough
2013).
In the realm of state-led social protection, there have been changes over the past decades which
tend to strengthen the role of markets, civil society, and small-scale groups such as families in
providing care and support. In particular, social protection in those countries of origin of migrants to
Europe has moved from a focus on the national state to more of an emphasis on local government and
international institutions, characterized by (labour) market liberalization (Mkandawire 2004). The
entanglement of social protection and migration has increasingly come to the attention of the
emigration states in the global South. They sometimes offer social protection to citizens abroad
through emigration-related policies and institutions that do not traditionally belong to the realm of
social security, typically discussed under the label ‘diaspora policy’ (Gamlen 2008; Chapter 9). Such
policies include, for example, educational and training programmes meant to facilitate incorporation
into the labour markets of immigration countries (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung 2011); programmes
favouring access to health care in the immigration country (and vice versa, see Lafleur and Lizin
2015); country of origin pension schemes available from abroad (Debnath 2016: 16); and
programmes to repatriate and re-attract workers and the so-called (highly) skilled (Cebolla-Boado et
al. 2016). The institutions that emigration states have used toward these ends are the classical ones,
such as embassies and consulates, but also purpose-specific bodies, such as the state-created
institutions like the Migrant Workers and Other Overseas Filipinos Resource Centre and the
Committee of Italians Abroad (cf. Lafleur 2013).
Next to states, markets are also providers of social security, mostly of insurance, and are generally
regulated by states. Market forms of social protection have gained more importance in the context of
deregulating the welfare state in OECD countries since the 1980s, and structural adjustment
programmes in the global South (Bender, Kaltenborn, and Pfleiderer 2013). Also, insurance within
multinational companies (MNCs) and private insurance are examples of social protection reaching
beyond the borders of national states. Because of the marketization trend, market-based providers, in
this case private insurers, have gained in importance (Kaasch 2016).
Civil society bodies that provide social protection (e.g. via social service organizations)
encompass a wide variety of forms, ranging from (international) NGOs active in development
cooperation, churches, and other religious communities active across borders, to migrant-led HTAs,
sometimes also called or calling themselves diaspora. They are not necessarily formally regulated by
law but still have formal requirements to which their members must adhere (cf. Portes and Fernandez-
Kelly 2015). Examples are faith-based associations, rotating credit associations, and burial societies
(Bouman 1994). Among them are, for instance, Zakat (the Muslim charity) (UNHCR 2012) and
funeral societies (Mazzucato 2006). Many of these organizations and associations, HTAs in
particular, usually engage in locally specific projects which focus on infrastructure in education and
health (Cağlar 2006; M. Orozco and Rouse 2007).

How to Theorize about Inequalities and Social Protection in Migration

For the conceptualization of the assemblage of social protection and emergent transnational social
rights and social standards, there are two types of approaches, one stemming from normative political
theory, and the other from political sociology. In normative political theory, in turn, two branches can
be distinguished: a world citizenship—or cosmopolitan—perspective, and a nationality perspective.
In a cosmopolitan citizenship perspective, social standards and social rights are part of desirable
world citizenship. An optimistic perspective may refer to Max Weber’s social and economic history
(Weber 1968 [1922]) and argue that citizenship was first conceived and practised at the municipal
level in ancient Greece and medieval Europe before it moved up one scale and became congruous
with membership in a territorial national state. Citizenship rights beyond the national state would
therefore be an evolutionary leap forward (Heater 2004). Ultimately, however, this would require a
global political community with socio-cultural resources such as specific reciprocity and diffuse
solidarity to be drawn on as required. With respect to migration this would entail a demanding
extension of Immanuel Kant’s idea of a cosmopolitan right to hospitality by means of collective
identities beyond the national level. Such a global political identity would today be conceivable only
as a transparent, constructed affiliation (Habermas 1998). And indeed, such an affiliation would
certainly be attractive in terms of the allocation of life chances according to legal citizenship. World
citizenship would not acknowledge any privileges passed on by descent or birth within a certain
territory, the most prominent of which is citizenship in national states. Viewed from a transnational
angle, the citizenship prerogative privileges members of countries in the global North and underlies
cross-border inequalities. Yet with world citizenship we would all formally have the same status as
members of an all-encompassing global polity. Social rights would require a willingness to
redistribute goods. This notion is less probable and less conceivable on a global scale than it is in
regions like Europe. The qualities of transnational solidarity can be observed when disaster strikes—
expressed in humanitarian aid or even intervention—or in development policies. Yet they have no
legal status and certainly no regulative components on the order of, say, EU social policy.
This critique of the concept of world citizenship highlights the central elements of a republican
version of national cosmopolitanism. The republican version conceives of social rights primarily as a
closed form of solidarity on a national scale (Walzer 1996). In this view, the following conditions can
be currently fulfilled only in a national state. First, holders of the respective legal citizenship are
counted as valid members of a polity and in this way reproduce the socio-cultural basis for
citizenship, namely specific reciprocity. Second, a common allegiance has a bonding effect on
citizens and enables them to agree on substantive rights and obligations that form the basis for their
membership. Third, citizenship confers participatory rights and political representation. Ultimately,
world citizenship from this perspective appears to be little more than a vague cosmopolitan idea in a
world lacking a fundamental moral consensus. A further criticism is that at best world citizenship
would weaken the bonds that hold citizens of a national state together. And only these national bonds
ensure that citizens maintain their ties to the rest of humanity. This critique of the concept of world
citizenship could be disputed, however, based on empirical survey findings that suggest that world
and national citizenship are not necessarily zero-sum notions (Furia 2005). Also, it neglects the idea
that national citizenship is in itself a mechanism that perpetuates transnational social inequality
through social closure by means of exclusive membership. At the very least, national citizenship is
ambivalent with respect to inclusion and exclusion.
The debate over cosmopolitan vs. national perspectives on social security can also be found in
theories of justice. There has been a vivid discussion of the moral significance of state boundaries
and thus the appropriate frame to which norms and rights should refer which could address cross-
border inequalities. In A Theory of Justice (1971) John Rawls proposed a clear principle of
distributive justice. In a nutshell, this difference principle says that economic inequalities within a
national society are unjust unless they benefit everyone, including the least advantaged. Furthermore,
he argued that distributive justice between different states (‘peoples’) is hardly possible because
there is nothing to distribute. In his view a society of states is not a scheme of cooperation for mutual
advantage and so there is no social asset whose distribution is a proper matter for redistribution.
Rawls’s critics hold otherwise. First, in conditions of interdependence national societies are not
sufficiently separate to justify their being treated as self-contained entities (Beitz 1979). Such a view
is congruent with a transnational perspective emphasizing the dense web across borders on the scale
of families and civil society. This argument concludes that the world has to be seen, in certain
respects, as a single society, and therefore the difference principle has to be applied to benefit the
least advantaged. Yet one of the questions that arises is whether such a world society is a scheme of
mutual advantage, as Rawls held about national societies. A world economic order which
systematically disadvantages people in the global South defies the notion of mutual advantage. The
character of such economic asymmetries across the globe and in historical perspective has been
firmly established by approaches such as world systems theory (Chirot and Hall 1982). Second, there
is a widespread argument that rich countries are responsible for the poverty of poor countries and that
the former should therefore acknowledge obligations to the latter. The arguments found in theories of
imperialism and dependency (e.g. Frank 1971; Wallerstein 1983) have been taken up once again in
political theory. For example, according to such a claim, environmental degradation, mass poverty,
malnutrition, and starvation are the price paid by the poor to support the lifestyle of most inhabitants
of the advanced industrial world. Thus, global redistribution, such as a tax on the use of natural
resources, would be a requirement of global social justice (Pogge 2002). Critics of this position,
mostly market liberally-minded economists, argue that free trade (i.e. an end to industrial and
agricultural protection in the advanced industrial world) would do more to help the poor than this
kind of world welfarism (Bhagwati 2004). In sum, since Rawls did not apply the difference principle
to the international realm, his strongest critics contend, this absence would allow for extreme global
inequalities (Barry 1991). In this view the application of a principle of justice would require a global
difference principle, not just an international one.
Responding to some of this criticism, Rawls later specified that a global difference principle
would be untenable because liberal states would then improperly impose social-liberal doctrine on
(potentially) non-liberal states. It constituted a kind of intolerance because it would refuse the right of
other peoples to live by principles of their own (Rawls 1999). Rawls thus argues in favour of a
pluralist idea of principles and an acknowledgement of history in setting norms. This comes out
clearly in his answer to a vexing question: what is the extent of obligations of richer countries
towards poorer countries? Most theorists would agree that we have different and more extensive
obligations towards those closer to us—family, friends, and fellow citizens—than we have towards
distant strangers (see, however, Singer 1972). The key question is how different and how much more
extensive? Rawls argues that our obligations extend only to helping societies that are not capable of
sustaining internal schemes of social justice—and in our case, social protection—to reach the point at
which they would be so capable, and he argues against the transfer of actual resources. For example,
help could be extended to support the right kind of civil society and state administration which could
serve as incubators of social rights and social services. One could speak of a position enabling states
to engage in internal redistribution.
An even stronger plea for the consideration of communal allegiances and pluralism can be found
in the work of Amartya Sen. Humans, in realizing their capabilities, need freedom to choose (Sen
1999). This basic premise makes room for a world in which people value very different allegiances.
Extending Sen’s idea, communal allegiance is to be considered not only in regard to poor countries.
National welfare states, like the Scandinavian ones, are built upon moderate nationalism and strong
immigration controls, arguably in order to secure reciprocity and trust underpinning social
citizenship. This aspect is important because—according to national cosmopolitans who see a close
link between moderate nationalism and social solidarity—schemes of international cooperation and
redistribution or even global rules depend on the willingness of discrete national states to engage in
solidary behaviour (cf. D. Miller 2017).
The foregoing normative considerations, which help us to imagine the options for social protection
across borders, must be supplemented by socio-political theories and concepts that can, in principle,
be empirically validated, in order to shift the focus from desirable hypothetical situations to emerging
legal constructs, their institutional contexts, and their consequences for social inequalities. For
example, world polity theory or world cultural theory, a neo-institutionalist approach (J. W. Meyer et
al. 1997), has provided fertile ground for theoretical probing. It examines whether there are
institutional forms, such as educational systems and, in this case, social protection systems, that are
common to all states. The underlying idea is that institutional isomorphism (i.e. cases in which
national states adopt similar forms of, for example, organizing old age retirement schemes) can be
traced to a Weberian notion of rationalization. Going beyond the pivotal role of states, the world
culture approach also takes into consideration NGOs, especially international ones (INGOs). The
basic idea is that in the sense of transnational visions and objectives world culture has been pushed
ahead primarily through the efforts of INGOs which have fostered cross-border awareness (Boli and
Thomas 1997). To some extent, world polity theory is concerned with really existing cosmopolitan
constructs.
For our purposes, social protection and migration regimes are a case in point for such
transnational diffusion. The implication is that institutions strive to appear modern in adapting
dominant ways of organizing social, economic, and political life. Role models can be found in, among
others, international organizations such as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organisation (UNESCO) for organizing primary and secondary education, or the EU’s Bologna
Process for tertiary university education. The dominant social mechanism operative here is diffusion
of organizational models in dealing with social protection, such as encoding social rights in
constitutions of national states or designing programmes to address issues around poverty, health,
unemployment insurance, and pensions (see, e.g. Leisering 2005).
Yet while this kind of neo-institutionalist theory greatly enhances our understanding of the spread
of some types of formal institutions at state and even global levels, it has little to say about how such
institutions are structured to contribute to the implementation of social and mobility rights. While we
have similar forms of organizing state-based social protection around the world (e.g. social insurance
and tax-paid schemes) it is evident that the share of national populations covered by such schemes is
much lower in the contexts of the global South compared to the global North. Similar observations
could be made with respect to migration: for example, many states distinguish between highly skilled
and low-skilled labour migrants, and among forced migrants between deserving asylum seekers and
those not falling under full protection status. Nonetheless, this does not tell us much about the
substantive differences in how immigration states organize admission. Also, we need to take a close
look at how social rights, such as the right to education, function for migrants. For example, in many
OECD states educational inequalities along the lines of social class and disability have persisted
over the past decades and those along the lines of ethnicity or migration background are staggeringly
high (e.g. Borgna 2016). Another question that has not yet been explored by advocates of the world
polity approach is whether or not certain functions are fulfilled by altogether different systems, for
instance systems of social protection on scales other than the national state, such as family and kinship
systems. To call such systems traditional is only part of the picture, as they are also to be seen as a
consequence of unfulfilled promises made by post-colonial states and international organizations.
Consequently, social rights and commitments at non-state levels must be sought not only in state–
citizen relations, but also in other arrangements such as family, kinship, and communal systems, or
clientelistic political practices (Chapters 5 and 6).
Nonetheless, world polity theory steers our attention to the processes of drawing the boundaries
that are relevant for the institutionalization of inequalities. We thus learn about the forms of
institutions and about the language used to capture and frame issues such as social protection and
migration. World polity theory alerts us to the social construction of inequalities across borders. The
transnationalized social question is a ‘semantics of inequality’ (Luhmann 1997). This is visible in
topics such as migration, development, and securitization (Chapter 7), and in environmental
destruction complemented by climate change (Chapter 10). What a political-sociological approach
also refers to is the importance of norms of equality for framing transnationalized aspects of social
protection.
Inequalities are evaluated on the basis of norms of equality. This view has been given credence
since the French Revolution by the rise of norms of equality in legitimizing democratic rule. Various
human and citizen rights have been embedded into national constitutions and also, more recently, in
international conventions, starting with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Human
and citizen rights have patterned political life in national states but increasingly also beyond. In the
field of migration and refugee movements, for example, the Geneva Convention constitutes a partial
global regime governing the rights of refugees. One norm in particular, the rule not to return refugees
to countries of origin in which they are not safe (non-refoulement), has gained widespread
acceptance. Other human and social rights, such as those embodied in conventions sponsored by the
ILO and the UN—for example, the Migration for Employment Convention (1949, No. 97, revised
2010) and the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and
Members of Their Families (UN General Assembly resolution 45/158, 1990)—have not been widely
recognized. What is crucial is that there is some standard by which social inequalities are perceived.
Inequalities become politically relevant against the background of equality norms, that is, when
inequalities violate such norms (de Tocqueville 1988 [1835/40]: 9). Equality norms are encapsulated
in a national context in state constitutions and, beyond that, for example, in regional declarations, such
as the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000) and, on a world scale, for
example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
It is therefore important to analyse which equality norms have been used by agents in the politics
of inequalities. In so doing, it is also important to keep in mind that norms of equality which serve as
reference points in public debates and mass action may change. For example, human rights have
become a major reference point only from the 1970s onwards—spurred by the demise of empire and
the anti-colonialist struggle immediately after the Second World War, and the decline of stark
ideological utopias after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1990s. Its beginnings were thoroughly
Eurocentric, an outcome of social movement pressure and human rights-infused politics with
particular norms, that is, legal principles which gave international law new prominence (cf. Moyn
2010).
In sum, the normative and positive theories seeking to account for the desirability and/or actual
emergence of transnational standards to address the social question mostly either suffer from an over-
idealized extension of rights from the national to a transnational or even global level, or seek to
defend the firm embeddedness of social rights on the national level. In general, the nexus of cross-
border spatial mobility and rights is not at the centre of attention (but see Wallerstein, Chase-Dunn,
and Suter 2015). Then again, normative theories of world citizenship allude to a world society as a
horizon of meaning and expectation that already embraces meta-norms such as equality (of
opportunity), democracy, and global justice. Politico-sociological approaches, on the other hand,
such as the world polity approach, refer not only to global horizons of expectation, as the world
citizenship approach does, but also to institutional types of multi-level political systems and multi-
agency constellations—such as international regimes at state level, or networks of state and non-state
organizations and family and kinship groups. World polity theory may help to shed light on the
diffusion of policy models which may not be national models (e.g. the emulation of OECD-type
welfare states), but might include elements of models, such as the combination of liberal market
approaches with private insurance, supported by civil society, community, and kinship arrangements.
It would be premature, however, to speak of world social regime or policy models akin to welfare
state regimes found in the OECD.
While there are emerging transnational social and labour standards, the situation with cross-
national governance of mobility beyond bi-national accords is even less conceptualized. For labour
migration, there is little regulation beyond supranational frames such as the EU. As to forced
migration, governance exists in the form of a partial regime, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and
their Additional Protocols. Overall, however, the reach of soft law is even shorter than with respect
to social protection proper, as relatively few states have signed the respective conventions on migrant
workers. What we have in the field of migration are ‘migration systems’ (Kritz, Lim, and Zlotnik
1992) which constitute historically contingent structures of flows of people, often embedded in
colonial relations, along with the flow of services, capital, and goods.

Four Fragmented Spaces of Social Protection in the World

Traditionally, the linkage of social protection and social inequality has been framed as an issue of
social rights—in Western countries at least. Yet we cannot start to understand social security in the
context of cross-border migration by limiting the analysis to countries of the global North. Moreover,
this latter perspective would neglect the fact that states across the world differ a great deal from one
another with respect to social protection. For heuristic purposes, it is helpful to make a somewhat
more fine-grained distinction than global North vs. global South. From a regime perspective, there
are four spaces of social protection—all of them criss-crossed by cross-border migration. It should
not be forgotten, however, that there are also signs of convergence across the globe. Social security,
in particular social assistance, has spread and thus is to be found in an increasing number of countries
around not only the global North but also the global South (Devereux and Sabates-Wheeler 2004).
Among the measures are social transfers, such as unconditional cash transfers and public works.
Only one-quarter of the world’s population has access to comprehensive state-sponsored and
state-regulated social protection (ILO 2017). The social provisions most relevant for the majority of
populations in all parts of the world are located in the respective national welfare or development
states. The conglomerate of states with similar degrees and forms of institutionalization of social
rights can be discerned in social spaces. There are four main types of social spaces of social
protection (Table 4.1). Altogether there exist quite divergent principles of social organization for
social protection: formally differentiated systems in space 1 and partly also in space 2; security only
available to certain sectors of the population—primarily privileged public employees and unionized
employees in the private sector—in spaces 3 and 4. In the latter two spaces, the concept of insecurity
is as important as that of protection or security. In making such distinctions, it should not be forgotten
that social protection is not only provided by the state and organizations but also by small groups,
mostly families and friendship circles.
Table 4.1. The four segments of social protection (in percentages)

Source: Own compilation based on Ghai (2006: 5–6).

The ‘classic’ welfare states of space 1 have been the ideal/typical point of reference for
understanding social protection, starting from T. H. Marshall’s concept of social citizenship and
reaching to global social policy approaches. Social policies in the other three spaces are, as a rule,
categorized and evaluated against the backdrop of concepts that developed in the industrialized cum
liberal-democratic countries. The constitutive basis of such welfare state systems has been a specific
type of capitalist market regulations. This type of welfare state system exists in the context of
politically regulated employment markets as the primary means of livelihood, and in highly
differentiated financial markets that provide secure prospects for investors. A relatively autonomous
state is essential for the political constitution and regulation of such markets. Only against this
background, and in particular with the help of historical compromises between social classes
regarding the regulation of markets, was that which T. H. Marshall called democratic-welfare-
capitalism and characterized as a hyphenated society conceivable (Marshall 1985: 104). In this first
space, family-provided social protection is mostly a significant add-on to highly developed and
differentiated state-based and thus public social protection.
Furthermore, in at least one region of this particular space—namely within the EU—cautious
endeavours are being made at the supra-state level to establish elements of social citizenship, or what
can be described as ‘nested citizenship’ (Faist 2001), within a multi-level political system. EU
citizenship and social rights within the Union are codified at different levels and nested within each
other. Sub-state, regional, state, and supra-state regulations on citizenship mutually complement each
other, but without seriously altering the status of national social citizenship. The regulations on
European social policy are mainly concerned with policies and institutions for guaranteeing the rights
of different categories of persons in specific policy areas. These include the validity (and
recognition) in all member states of periods of employment of migrant workers in other countries in
which social insurance contributions are mandatory, equality at work for men and women, and the
same level of standards for working conditions, health, and safety at work, as well as protection
against unfair dismissal. Concerning the status of migrants, there is a clear divide between citizens
from EU member states working and residing in other member states on the one hand, and citizens
from third countries in the EU on the other. The former are clearly privileged over the latter.
Social policy and social rights are one of those areas of European integration in which the
influence of the member states is usually seen to be dominant—despite the pressure on the social
protection systems arising from the freedom to provide services and the right to compete. The rapid
economic integration has so far not been matched by a concomitant harmonization and adaptation of
social policies and social rights. Nor have threats to social rights at the member state level been
absorbed through supra-state regulations. EU citizenship, which was established through the Treaty of
Maastricht, cannot therefore be regarded as an effective step toward creating and maintaining
substantive social rights. Many of these regulations can, however, be interpreted as the outcome of
market-creating, ‘negative integration’ in the EU (i.e. the abolition of barriers to the free exchange of
production factors that include goods, capital, services, and also labour). These observations suggest
that what we see is not simply a replica of a member state’s welfare policies as a combination of
distributive, redistributive, and regulative policies at EU level, but federated and regulative forms of
social policy and social rights.
Space 2 roughly covers the transformation states of Eastern Europe and the newly industrialized
countries (NICs) in Southeast Asia. In the latter, social rights developed in the last decades of the
twentieth century—and this occurred primarily against the background of nationalistic state-
citizenship concepts that were typical of the global South. For East European states formerly under
the influence of the Soviet Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the further
development of social rights is a prime objective within the context of the transition to capitalist
economies. In terms of migration, this category of states has been important. For example, close to
half of all migration to Western and Southern Europe over the past thirty years has originated in the
East European transformation states (see also Chapter 6 on transnational social protection spaces
Germany–Kazakhstan).
At the same time, the dismantling of formerly guaranteed social rights in countries of the former
Eastern bloc cannot be overlooked (Standing 1996). This is by no means the case for other
transformation states in other regions, however, and especially for those that recently underwent the
transition from authoritarian development regimes to democracy. In some cases—for instance in
Taiwan and South Korea—democratization changed the incentives for politicians, bureaucrats, and
civil society actors to such an extent that an expansion of social rights, for example in the health care
sector, can be observed; politicians have been able to garner votes by introducing social policies. It
is no coincidence that in the successful NICs in Southeast Asia the emphasis lay less on social
protection in the form of state-sponsored social security and more on social investments. Priority was
therefore given to education and health, which can be categorized as market-making policy areas.
Typically, the social insurance systems that have been developed in Southeast Asia since the early
1980s as a rule do not take into account measures for securing minimum means of subsistence for the
very poor. Instead, these schemes emphasize private responsibility. Family-oriented values mesh with
privatization. At the same time, such welfare regimes are not only compatible with politically
authoritarian regimes but enable a division of labour which exempts governments from being blamed
for social protection gaps (Nguyen and Locke 2014).
Characteristic of space 3 is a structural heterogeneity in all areas of society. While elements of
social security benefits can be found especially among metropolitan public servants, state-sponsored
social protection is usually absent in other sectors and regions, creating a cleavage between the
public sector and the rest but also urban and rural areas. Urban areas are often seen by observers as
zones of modern citizenship, while in the rural areas ‘traditional’ rights and obligations prevail. In
Africa in particular, this structure can be characterized as a legacy of colonialism (Mamdani 1996).
In certain sub-Saharan regions of Africa some forms of exclusive citizenship based on ethnicity are
identifiable as drivers of insecurity, conflict, and thus forced migration.
In Latin America, this structural heterogeneity obtains within distinctive protection systems. Many
Latin American countries already have a relatively extensive social security system in comparison to
other countries in the southern hemisphere. These often comprise state-organized, guaranteed pension
and health insurance schemes, and sometimes rudimentary unemployment insurance systems, as in
Chile and Venezuela. As a rule, the indigent are excluded from the social insurance systems: only a
minority of wage-earners and middle-class white-collar workers are able to benefit from them. The
social security systems for which these categories are applicable are often of a clientelistic nature
(i.e. part of an asymmetrical deal entailing votes for ad hoc promises) (cf. Dagnino 2003; L. Taylor
2004). Since the 1970s, with the breakaway from the import-substitution model, the structural
adjustment measures of the IMF have pressed for at least partial privatization. This, together with a
loss of political significance for public servants, trade unions, and the industrial proletariat,
eliminated the previously existing similarities with south-west European welfare states (Barrientos
2004). The chief guiding principle of international organizations from the 1970s until well into the
1990s was the assertion that social security would improve above all through economic growth, the
growth of the formal employment market, and increasing urbanization; and the associated claim—not
substantiated by economic research—that there would eventually be a ‘trickle-down’ effect from rich
to poor segments of the population. This view is contradicted by empirical findings showing a
positive correlation between high levels of social inequality and high economic growth (see, inter
alia, Mehrotra 2000). With respect to Europe, migrants from South American states have mostly
moved to Southern Europe, Spain, and Italy in particular.
Space 4 lacks the fundamental implementation of a legitimate state monopoly of coercion, so that
citizens’ rights are often severely compromised. A Hobbesian order prevails, and, in cases where the
state monopoly of power is hopelessly inadequate, or in the case of disintegrating states, even
borders on a complete lack of statehood and thus a total absence of formally guaranteed rights. State
institutions have a low level of autonomy, as was observable, for example, in the 1990s in Somalia,
Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Afghanistan (Milliken and Krause 2003).
As converse examples of social security regimes, it might be more appropriate to term them systems
of social insecurity. The question that arises here is to what extent alternative forms of political rule
that have no state monopoly of force permit social protection measures. As to migration, it is crucial
to remember that it is not the poorest countries that produce most cross-border migrants, but rather
middle-income countries, mostly those countries of spaces 2 and 3 (Abel and Sander 2014).
Nonetheless, there have been states at war, originally in spaces 2 or 3, which disintegrated and
produced insecurity for citizens in many respects, such as Syria and Iraq in the 2010s, resulting in an
outflow of forced migrants.
For the majority of the population in spaces 3 and 4, there are assemblages of various scales of
protection in which civil society and kinship elements dominate. In space 4, owing to the low degree
of national statehood, the regulation of insecurity rather than social security or protection could be
said to be the case. In brief, therefore, it can hardly be claimed that the large majority of citizens
around the world enjoy the benefits of state-guaranteed social rights and concomitant benefits. At
best, those excluded from such social protection regimes themselves organize schemes that primarily
comprise non-state actors such as landowners, religious communities, and kinship systems.
Therefore, it is important to highlight in which ways migrants themselves, for example through
remittances, organize social protection and contribute to (in)equalities.
Three points are particularly noteworthy here. First, the transnationalized social question must be
seen in the light of a highly fragmented world with respect to the vast range of opportunities that
citizens’ social rights provide in different countries. States in space 4 that are not integrated to a
significant degree through trade and investment in the world economy have hardly any business with
labour and social standards as defined by international conventions. Second, an analysis of
transnational social protection cannot be made in isolation from the relevant non-state institutional
substructures, as otherwise the dynamics of social security verifiably provided, for instance, through
obligations and undertakings by migrants, will be neglected. Third, the means of providing social
protection in spaces 3 and 4 are determined by transnational factors to a greater degree than in space
1. Such factors are institutional, such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization
(WTO), which determine parameters through rules and the provision of finance—commercial, such as
transnational capital and investments of foreign investors; civil-societal through transnational NGOs
and the significant role they play in development aid or cooperation; and kinship systems through
migrants and their transactions back home, such as financial remittances, and also information on
issues such as health, and care provided for family members.
Looking at all four spaces of social protection, migration can be seen as one of the mechanisms by
which businesses are operating to access vast labour resources. The latter are crucial in creating
value in goods and services. One certainly needs to take heed of the exponential growth of the waged
labour force outside the OECD world. The world’s labour force grew by 63 per cent, from 1.9
billion in 1980 to 3.1 billion in 2006. Most striking is the proportion of this labour—84 per cent—
which toils in the precarious conditions that exist in space 3. World markets depend on access to this
vast labour force out of which more than one billion work in what is called the informal economy
(Smith 2016: 113–14, based on ILO data). Three of the ways through which access to the world’s
labour force has been achieved are foreign direct investment, subcontracting, and the management of
extended supply chains. The latter is favoured by many firms because of the ways in which contracts
can be set up to increase competition between local businesses, which asserts downward pressure on
wage rates. One may speculate to what extent such supply chains make migration unnecessary.
Although there is some support for this claim when it comes to manufacturing, it is not true for the
service sector and the recruitment of highly skilled labour in space 1. Therefore, it would be
premature to argue that employers in space 1, once prime supporters of the import of labour, are
nowadays more interested in investments abroad and the control of supply chains (cf. M. Peters
2017). Also, when supply chains are short, such as in construction, agriculture, hospitality, health, and
social care, migrants are needed on the spot in the global North. Despite the huge increase in the
labour force, the relatively low rate of cross-border migration in today’s world does not lead to a
global convergence of wage levels. Workers in spaces 3 and 4 are not gradually catching up with
their northern counterparts. In turn, this situation means that labour standards and social protection
remain at an overall low level, and indirectly add to the migration potential.
Of course, belonging to one of these spaces is too coarse a criterion for drawing specific
conclusions regarding the relationship between welfare state development and cross-border
migration. As to emigration, evidence from post-communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe
(CEE), and more specifically the accession states to the EU, suggests that the higher the level of state-
provided social protection, the less pronounced are forms of migration caused by low livelihood
expectations. Conversely, those CEE countries where social spending figures were lower,
unemployment benefit schemes less extensive, and where labour market mismatches remained high,
experienced greater emigration (Kureková 2013). Similar considerations apply to immigration
countries: as already mentioned, those immigration regions in space 1 which do not extend a modicum
of social rights to migrants tend to have higher rates of labour migrants than those states which honour
them at least minimally. This hunch is confirmed by a comparison between the Gulf States on the one
hand and West European welfare states on the other (Chapter 3).
In sum, the four spaces of social protection are intricately related through cross-border migration.
This not only applies to labour migration but also to forced migration. It is a well-established finding
that forced migrants head for the nearest safe country. According to the UNHCR, countries in the
global South (developing countries) host more than four-fifths of the world’s refugees. And the
average length of stay in refugee camps is about ten years (Milner and Loescher 2011). It is the
substance and understanding of the citizenship of the respective immigration and transit countries
which makes a decisive difference. Unless forced migrants are allowed to participate fully in the
social life of that country, quite a few will want to leave. Not being able to return home, they will
head for a second, or third, or fourth country, crossing several more borders in the process. This is an
instance of mixed migration driven by multiple factors (Zetter 1991) and borne out by the recent
refugee question in Europe in the middle of the 2010s—a Syrian refugee in Turkey who chose not to
spend years living in a refugee camp or as a self-settled migrant on the margins of Turkish society, or
an Eritrean migrant who was refused a work permit in a neigbouring country.

A Global Migration Regime?

Before turning to how social and labour standards are actually implemented in cross-border
migration processes, it is necessary to take a closer look at the regulation of migration itself. As in the
field of social protection, a global governance regime in the field of cross-border migration is not
found, at least not in the sense of a coherent set of ‘principles, norms, rules, and decision-making
procedures’ (Krasner 1983: 1). There is a partial regime for asylum, administered by UNHCR. The
refugee regime was established by the Geneva Convention in 1951. While it originally covered
Europe only, extensions in the course of subsequent decades have included other regions of the world.
Also, the original grounds for asylum, namely, persecution by states on the grounds of belonging to
social, religious, or ethnic groups, was later extended to include gender and non-state persecution.
The few other comprehensive migration regimes that exist are mostly regional in nature, such as the
Economic Union of West Africa (ECOWAS) and the EU.2 Within the EU, free mobility of labour
represents one of the four pillars of mobility—capital, goods, services, and persons; still, free
internal EU mobility is more or less restricted to workers and a few other categories, such as
students. As to labour migration, member states have been reluctant to cede competence to the EU
because of welfare state protection and privileged access to citizenship (Boswell and Geddes 2010).
Immigration countries, in particular, have been reluctant to engage in international regulation of
(labour) migration; they have preferred to engage in bilateral accords. The little global regulation of
labour migration to be discerned is found in the various conventions of the ILO regulating migrant
work, above all ILO Convention 97 from 1949 and 143 from 1975. A UN convention on the rights of
migrant workers and their families (1991) also exists, but it has been ratified by only a very few
countries and practically no immigration countries. In short, there is little in terms of enforcement
other than shaming offenders.
As to the transnationalized social question with cross-border migration as a dominant form of exit,
what is usually not taken into account sufficiently are multiple elements of human rights regimes. Such
elements include the right to exit from and enter one’s own country (where one’s citizenship is held),
according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13. There are still some emigration
states forbidding emigration. However, ‘closed borders’ (Dowty 1987) on the emigration side in the
sense of legal obstacles have rapidly eroded since the end of the Cold War. Yet there is no
corresponding right to entry in destination countries. Nonetheless, immigrants in liberal democracies
may enjoy certain human rights, such as the non-refoulement principle laid down in the Geneva
Convention. Also, in principle, there is a right to family reunification for many categories of legally
sanctioned immigrants. Therefore, immigration restrictions on the grounds of welfare state protection
and threats to state security and cultural traditions in countries of destination are sometimes checked,
at least in part, by the human rights attributed also to migrants.
What emerges clearly in the efforts at global governance of cross-border migration is the inherent
tension between observance of migrants’ and their dependents’ human rights on the one hand and
national state sovereignty entitlement to control access (and work and residence) on the other. This
tension is called the liberal paradox with respect to immigration countries with a liberal-democratic
orientation: while states control their borders and decide autonomously whom to admit, they are also
obliged to grant certain human rights—such as emergency health care—to those who reside in their
territories. Overall, there is little in the way of a comprehensive mobility scheme in the sense of a
global regime. What can be found are bilateral mechanisms, such as recruitment schemes in labour
migration, the most well-known of which in Europe are the ‘guest worker’ policies of the 1960s and
1970s. Despite this state of affairs, there have been on-going efforts to introduce elements of global
regulation of international migration, especially with respect to migration and development—usually
counteracted by state security concerns. Although we certainly cannot speak of a coherent global
regime, the assemblage of regulations around the globe gives us at the very least some hints about the
de facto regime governing cross-border migration.
Most efforts in recent decades to regulate cross-border migration in a global fold have been
driven by agendas to push for ‘migration management’ (Ghosh 2000). They consist of efforts to
reconcile an orientation toward economic efficiency with some norm-guided principles upholding the
rights of migrants. Yet inequality-reproducing mechanisms such as existing free trade practices and
unequal terms of trade have not been called into question. Moreover, economic penetration of
countries in the global South, for example in fishing, has uprooted many persons in the first place (cf.
Emmanuel 1972). Migration management has tended to gloss over power asymmetries and divergent
interests of countries in the global South and the global North (Geiger and Pécoud 2013). This is a
result of promoting the illusion that managing migration can be beneficial for all stakeholders:
countries of destination, countries of origin, and migrants and their significant others themselves. This
utterly unrealistic triple-win scenario clearly favours the interests of the migrant-receiving countries
and, by implication, many multinational corporations operating across the globe.
The first kind of concerted effort at migration management, a fusion of migration and development,
occurred at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994.
There, 179 governments decided on a twenty-year comprehensive Programme of Action (PoA), a set
of internationally agreed recommendations on both internal and international migration, with a
specific section on ‘(i)nternational migration and development’. Later PoAs all referred back to the
1994 conference (UNFPA 2014). Migration was held to contribute to development as well as losses
suffered by countries of origin by brain drain. The mechanisms envisaged were financial remittances
as well as cultural exchange and remittances, later also called social remittances (UNFPA 2014:
105–6). Crucially, the programme made a distinction between regular and irregular migrants as well
as between refugees and (labour) migrants. Whereas legal migration is considered conducive to
development (and to high productivity) (UNFPA 2014: 109), irregular migrants are cast as a social
problem for immigration countries and their state sovereignty and also as victims of traffickers and
racist discrimination. The latter are not seen as actors who contribute to the development of their
countries of origin. In other words, the positive developmental impact attributed to cross-border
migration is seen to be limited to regular and voluntary migration (UNFPA 2014: 112–14).
Years later, the Berne Initiative, a state-led consultative process launched in June 2001 by the
Swiss government, sought to put together a set of ‘common understandings’ and ‘effective practices’ at
the international level, including migration and development (S. Martin 2014: 271–7). The goal of the
Berne Initiative is to obtain better management of migration at the regional and global level through
inter-state cooperation. Participants in the Berne Initiative include governments from all regions of
the world and relevant stakeholders, including international and regional organizations, civil society
groups, and independent migration experts. In particular, IOM, ILO, UNHCR, the Inter-Governmental
Consultations on Asylum, Refugees and Migration Policies in Europe, North America and Australia
(IGC), the European Commission, and the International Centre for Migration Policy Development
(ICMPD) have played an active role in the process.
The declarations of the Berne process resulted in recommendations similar to the Cairo
programme and used similar concepts. In December 2004, for example, a non-binding reference
framework was published, the ‘International Agenda for Migration Management’ (IAMM). In a
nutshell, the framework emphasizes not only the necessity of a dialogue and intensified cooperation
between states, non-state actors, and all those involved in the governance of migration (IOM/FOM
2005: 27–30), but also the importance of national sovereignty in admission and border control
(IOM/FOM 2005: 31–4). And similar to the PoA of the ICMPD, the distinction between regular and
irregular migration is used as a device to distinguish between positive and negative migration for all
parties concerned, that is, migrants, and immigration and emigration states (IOM/FOM 2005: 34–45).
Again, the positive development potential of migration is seen to be based upon the role of diasporas
and remittances. Dutifully, the document also refers to the risk of brain drain—but only after
mentioning the beneficial impact of brain gain for all involved. Brain drain is supposed to be
addressed by ‘international cooperation on ethical recruitment practices’ (IOM/FOM 2005: 60), later
further developed as ‘fair migration’ (Chapter 9). Another articulated goal is that the ‘policies on
poverty reduction, globalisation, security, refugees and migration’ should be harmonized (IOM/FOM
2005: 58–61). No mention was made of the growing securitization which has accompanied efforts at
linking migration and development.
In a similar vein, irregular migrants, in addition to stateless persons and IDPs, are identified as
being in a precarious human rights situation, although no conclusion is reached encouraging the
regularization of irregular migrants (IOM/FOM 2005: 45–9). Furthermore, refugees are seen as
victims, connected to irregular migration, even more so than in the ICMPD’s statement. Again, they
are not seen as having a potential to contribute to the development of countries of origin or destination
(IOM/FOM 2005: 49–50), and no mention is made of their efforts at self-organization. In sum,
variations of the conceptual distinctions and empirical claims found in these two documents—the
ICMPD’s PoA and the Berne Initiative’s IAMM—can be found in subsequent international
documents.
Directly following this line of thought, the Global Commission on International Migration
(GCIM), convened by then UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, sought to establish a heretofore
missing ‘coherent approach to migration’ (GCIM 2005: 2). Taking up the Berne Initiative’s call for
integrating migration and development governance, it called for measures to increase the flow of
financial remittances to the countries of origin by easing the transfer of money and reinforcing this
impact by ‘good economic governance’ in the origin countries (GCIM 2005: 24–9). Diasporas and
return migrants appear as actors who stimulate development (GCIM 2005: 29–31). Again, irregular
migration is portrayed as a negative phenomenon, this time with the exhortation that legalization can
be a useful measure. No mention is made of the solid research insight that irregular migration is an
inescapable by-product of regular migration in the case of labour migration because of the social
mechanism of relative deprivation (Mackie 1995), and that irregular migration is one of the few
options left for forced migrants in face of restrictive immigration and asylum policies. In addition,
countries are urged to honour rights of refugees (GCIM 2005: 32–41); and not least from an
integration point of view, GCIM emphasizes the rights of all migrants (GCIM 2005: 42–64).
The ensuing High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development, which took place
twice—in 2006 and 2013—in the frames of the 61st and 62nd General Assembly of the UN, repeated
these suggestions and distinctions. It called for fighting the causes of forced migration, the rights and
freedoms of migrants, and an end to discrimination against migrants (UN 2006: 2–5). In these and
similar documents it remains unclear what is meant by the ‘root causes’ of migration beyond what is
termed ‘drivers’, that is, the proximate factors leading to the inception and perpetuation of migration
(cf. Van Hear, Bakewell, and Long 2017). The second High-Level Dialogue established
unaccompanied minors as a category especially in need of protection, a group that is also ascribed a
‘potential to build social, economic and cultural bridges of cooperation and understanding across
societies’ (UN 2013: 3), and gave a stronger consideration of ecological causes of migration.
Other international commissions engaged in similar exhortations. A case in point was also the
World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization (WCSDG 2004). In a report entitled ‘A
Fair Globalization: Creating Opportunities for All’, it appealed to multilateral institutions to consider
the agenda for social justice, human rights, and decent work. In short, WCSDG sought to establish a
norm-guided approach to global governance. The WCSDG, as other groups before, recommended a
dialogue between emigration and immigration countries on policy issues of mutual interest, such as
brain drain, procedures for temporary migration, harnessing migration for development, and social
protection and labour market policies.
The Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) has taken place annually since 2007
and is defined as ‘an informal multilateral and state-led multi-stakeholder process that offers the
opportunity to governments to come together—with other stakeholders as appropriate—to identify
practical and feasible ways to strengthen the mutually beneficial relationship between migration and
development’ (GFMD 2007: 1). The catalogue of topics of the nine meetings until 2016 reads very
much like those already mentioned by the initiatives discussed before. Nonetheless, there are
differences, which go beyond the neo-liberal fold of thinking. For example, the meeting in Manila in
2008 demanded rights not only for regular but also irregular migrants. More than other international
forums, GFMD has focused on coherence between migration and economic cooperation policy, as
stated in the 2009 meeting in Athens (GFMD 2009: 15–39). The Stockholm meeting in 2013
emphasized that the contribution of migration to economic development is not exhausted by financial
remittances; it can also enhance societal progress (GFMD 2014: 50–63). In general, the GFMD
meetings went into greater detail and beyond overgeneralized statements. For example, the Geneva
meeting in 2011 dealt ‘with three key development related challenges that arise in the context of
labour mobility: how to engage the private sector more in labour market planning; how to lower the
costs of migration for higher development gains; and the specific case of global domestic workers at
the interface of migration and development’ (GFMD 2011: 18). They also reflected, perhaps due to
the annual format, current trends, such as the refugee issues in 2015–16, when the 2016 Dhaka
meeting addressed the legal protection of migrants, especially of ‘women at risk, children and victims
of trafficking’, migrants in crisis situations, and the corresponding necessity of internationally
coordinated rules and institutions on cross-border migration (GFMD 2016: 1–2).
None of these state-dominated initiatives has challenged prevailing ideologies such as the benefits
of free trade which—along with financialization—result in strengthened asymmetries between the
different segments of social protection around the globe. In short, recognition of the fact that power
and economic asymmetries are replicated by the current economic regimes is almost totally absent.
Another characteristic of the interfaces discussed is the limited possibilities for civil society
actors to make an impact. With the notable exception of the business sector, participation in the
‘invited spaces’ of international forums by civil society groups such as trade unions, peasant
movements, religious organizations, and plural organizations such as the Peoples Global Action on
Migration, Development, and Human Rights (PGA), and the World Social Forum on Migration
(WSFM), remains at a developmental stage (Delgado Wise forthcoming). It is no coincidence that
interfaces such as the GFMD have so far failed to implement the basic elements of the three main
conventions by the ILO and UN on the rights of migrant workers: these are ILO convention 97 on
Migration and Employment (1949), ILO convention 143 (1975), and the International Convention on
the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (1990). Instead,
the GFMD has hailed temporary migration workers’ programmes as an example of ‘good practices’.
Beyond the debates and declarations just sketched, institutional changes have taken place, the most
important of which occurred in 2016 when IOM was elevated to an associated organization of the UN
(IOM 2016), a status akin to the WTO. In essence, this means that, although not anchored in the
charter of the UN (in particular Articles 57 and 63), IOM fulfils the role of monitoring cross-border
migration in the UN system, without, however, including forced migrants and refugees who remain
under the purview of UNHCR. Organizations such as the WTO and now IOM constitute an integral
part of the work of the Chief Executives Board for Coordination (CEB) of the UN (UNSCEB 2016).
Although there clearly is no global regime akin to that of world trade in the field of migration,
international organizations and their interfaces have provided important stimulus to national and local
politics and policy-making through transnational diffusion processes, and effects are apparent. Shortly
before the discussion on the positive impact of cross-border migration on socio-economic
development took off again in the 2000s, international organizations such as the World Bank, and
international gatherings such as GFMD, the UN, and the EU High-Level Dialogue on Migration and
Development, placed the issue squarely on the agenda and it was taken up by national states and their
respective agencies, for example the Department for International Development (DFID) in the UK and
the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ). Seen in this way, the efforts just discussed
not only stimulated but came close to determining the agenda with respect to cross-border migration.
While generic social protection issues have not been as prominent, they have emerged as visible
side-lines in most of these discussions.
Future-oriented agreements, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG),3 continue the
train of thought developed by its predecessor, the Millennium Development Goals. As an example,
SDG No. 8.8 refers to the protection of migrant workers: ‘protect labor rights and promote safe and
secure working environments of all workers, including migrant workers, particularly women
migrants, and those in precarious employment’. Safe migration is also called for in SDG No. 10.7:
‘[f]acilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through
the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies’.
 It is instructive to single out the category of irregular/undocumented migrants. The beneficial
impact of migration for development and the new agency attributed to migrants refer to regular
migrants only, whereas irregular migrants are considered to be a ‘problem’. From a purely economic
point of view there is no coherent and forceful argument to deny a positive role to irregular migrants.
After all, there is no evidence that irregular migrants remit less than regular migrants, that irregular
migrants contribute less to the economic prosperity of the destination countries, or that they are less
active in providing effective social protection to their significant others across borders. However,
they pose a challenge to the regulation of immigration labour markets and welfare states. Quite
clearly, irregular migrants are seen as more of a security issue. Here, it is not only the economic
aspect of national states but their territorial control dimension which shines through processes of
securitization (Chapter 7).
In sum, the global governance of cross-border migration is low compared to areas such as trade
and even social standards. For example, while the WTO counts 164 UN member states as subject to
its standards and rules, only a handful of immigration states are committed to protecting the basic
social rights of migrant workers, as expressed in the three seminal conventions mentioned above. The
bulk of migrant-receiving countries has not ratified the basic ILO and UN conventions which
recognize the basic human rights of migrant workers and their families. More generally, there is no
overall mechanism to coordinate cross-border migration of mainly labour migrants and ensure asylum
for forced migrants. The consequences of interlinkages are highly politicized, as the mobility of
highly skilled professionals suggests. Their expertise is sought after by technologically and
economically advanced centres. For the category of the highly skilled the limitation of a single place
of residence determining their life chances is incorrect—indeed, there are divergent interpretations.
One side, in the past mostly countries in the global South, has connected this mobility with brain
drain, a loss of skilled or educated human resources, by marginalized countries. The other side, most
often industrialized countries, speaks of brain gain or brain circulation and depicts the situation as
beneficial for emigration regions, immigration regions, and the mobile persons alike. While the first
emphasizes cross-border inequalities, the second speaks of favourable impacts on political and
economic development.

The Implementation of Social Standards in Cross-Border Migration

The transnationalized social question can be understood from two angles, which reflects the tension
between the national state and cross-border or global dynamics and the difference between social
rights and social standards. On the one hand, national citizenship determines much of the spatial
distribution of transnational social inequality. This is because, first, the principles of the attribution of
formal membership according to descent or place of birth have significant consequences for a wide
range of social inequalities and for life chances. Second, the degree to which social rights and
standards are established and implemented varies tremendously in different parts of the world. The
mechanisms by which membership is attributed, and the level of social protection provided, reinforce
and consolidate global social inequalities. On the other hand, the universally accepted meta-norms of
equality and democratization have brought global economic asymmetries and a new mix of institutions
and agencies into focus, as in the case of social standards concerning work and social protection.
These transnational social legal standards are, however, not legal claims in a narrow sense in that
they can be asserted by legal means. Rather, they constitute soft law.
 Even the most highly institutionalized cross-border union, the EU, has precious little authority in
the realm of social policy and social rights. The explicit competence of the EU in the area of social
citizenship extends to gender equality, the portability of social rights accrued by migrant citizens of
member states in other member states, and occupational health and safety regulations. Even weaker
are social rights in other supranational entities, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), in which social standards simply constitute a side agreement. Beyond the national state and
beyond the realm of the EU, social regulation is available in the form of ultimately non-binding
international conventions upon which social standards rest, and since the 1980s more and more of
these social standards have been rendered as being based on human rights. Most social standards are
legitimized as direct outflows of human rights. These are less robust than national citizen rights in that
opportunities for enforcement are usually somewhat lower.
Public policies affecting social protection in the local, national, and international realms have
undergone significant changes over the past decades. This is visible in how international, national,
and transnational institutions have framed socio-economic or human development. Crucially, social
policy and development thinking have moved from a focus on the national state to more emphasis on
local government and international institutions, and terms such as ‘global social policy’ which
involve stakeholders such as national governments, international organizations, and (I)NGOs have
flourished (Deacon 1997). Correspondingly, social rights as human rights have become points of
departure. Social rights in international conventions constitute the shared vocabulary from which
political debates start. After the Second World War, UN organizations began to consider social rights
in conjunction with basic rights, along with political and civil rights. Meanwhile, some international
organizations no longer discuss social protection and concomitant social rights merely as a factor
contributing to economic development, but as intrinsic rights. Explicit reference to the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural
Rights (1966), and even the rights of citizens to a social contract on the national state level is
widespread (e.g. UNDP 2005b), and so is an emphasis on the universality of human rights and
citizens’ rights (Brysk and Shafir 2004). They are universal in the sense that, for instance, all member
states are signatories of the International Covenant on Social and Economic Rights (1966). The
essential social rights laid down in Articles 22–7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(1948) are a fundamental right to school education, the right to work and to join or form a trade union,
the right to a basic or minimum income, food, clothing, housing, medical care, and social security.
The high percentage of member states who have signed the conventions just mentioned stands in stark
contrast to the low number of signatories to international conventions concerning migrants.
Social standards have been legitimized as referring to human rights. This relatively new turn,
dating back to the 1980s, is part of an older argumentation. Since the nineteenth century, labour and
social standards were legitimized by basic moral and humanitarian arguments. They can be found in
international movements to end slavery and boycotts of goods produced by child labour. Most often,
these moral arguments have had also an instrumental side in that social standards are meant to result
both in a recognition of human dignity and in a healthier and better educated workforce.
The transnational regulation of employment and social standards comprises international
institutions and regimes such as the ILO, social clauses in trade agreements, public codes of conduct,
and the UN Global Compact; but it also includes more private transnational regulatory forms such as
codes of conduct for specific businesses, international framework agreements, or social labels. The
governance of social and labour standards is characterized by a wide diversity of regulations
involving the traditional agents, such as national states, the trade unions, and employers’ associations,
but also new actors such as social movements and NGOs. A salient point is that sanctionable rights
and obligations have to an increasing degree been substituted by employers’ voluntary self-regulation,
especially in the case of transnational businesses. Such standards are therefore frequently private,
voluntary transnational arrangements, and their regulation relies on cooperation, rather than sanctions
(Clavet et al. 2008).
The development of social standards must be seen within the context of a world that is highly
fragmented with respect to the vast range of opportunities that citizens’ social rights and resources
provide in different countries. Not surprisingly, the citizens of those states that are marginalized and
are not integrated to a significant degree through trade and investment in the world economy have
hardly anything to do with, for instance, labour and social standards as defined by international
conventions. To a greater degree than in the OECD world, in marginalized and so-called developing
countries the means of providing social protection are determined by transnational factors. Such
factors are led by international organizations, such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO, which
determine parameters through rules and the provision of finance; commerce, such as transnational
capital and investments of foreign investors; civil society, through transnational NGOs and the
significant role they play in development aid or cooperation; and kinship systems, through migrants
and their remittances back home. The heavy-handed dominance of OECD countries in the architecture
of international organizations also accounts for the resistance of states not only in marginalized
countries, but also in newly industrializing and transforming countries, to common social standards
through mechanisms such as the WTO (Stiglitz 2002). There has been, at least on the part of
international organizations, a move from structural adjustment policies vis-à-vis countries in Africa,
Latin America, and Southeast Asia, which favoured rigid free-market approaches, to more complex
policies. The latter favour a combination of a free-market approach with one that uses market-based
insurance in combination with targeted policies for the poor or needy, and a heavy focus on social
capital and local community, characterized by keywords such as empowerment and capacity-building
(Buch-Hansen and Lauridsen 2012). Nonetheless, even this slightly more socially embedded neo-
liberal approach seeks to subordinate social protection to market principles.
There are countervailing tendencies, though. Most importantly, the framing of the transnationalized
social question as one of social rights or, more broadly, democracy and equality, brings to the fore the
crucial issue in political debates and conflicts—the legitimacy of orders of inequality. Given the
obvious absence of a Marshallian world on a global scale in which capitalism and democracy are
linked by a world welfare state, many persons around the globe readily associate globalization, a
convenient shorthand for seminal processes of social transformation, with unfair social outcomes and
oppose it. The alter-globalization movement builds on the perception that prevailing patterns of trade
and income distribution are unjust. One may speculate whether there is already a contemporary
countermovement in the making of which the migrant labour force—sometimes classified as part of
the ‘precariat’—is a part (Schierup et al. 2015).
It has been argued that limitless and unbounded commodification of labour is not only destructive
to workers but to society itself; hence the argument for a re-embedding of markets through institutions
of social protection (Polanyi 2001 [1944]). One of the worst cases is forced labour, a ‘form of
adverse incorporation’ (Phillips and Mieres 2014), namely cases in which, for example, a worker is
restricted to one employer, or is prohibited from unionizing. Other instances of forced labour are
bonded labour demanded as a means of repayment for a loan, and schemes which bring men, women,
and children into a situation of exploitation through the use of violence, or even descent-based and de
facto slavery. In 2012, the number of persons engaged in forced labour was estimated to amount to
more than twenty-one million workers (ILO 2012).
If it is true that opposition to market-dominated globalization and opposition to inequality are
closely linked, people’s beliefs about inequality are relevant because their views and above all
practices feed into the political process. Considering people’s attitudes, social inequalities are
transnational in the sense that those who care about intra-state inequality are also very likely to speak
out against the cross-border gap between rich and poor regions (Lübker 2004). This finding suggests
that the division between national and cosmopolitan orientations is not as relevant as sometimes
assumed in normative theories. There is thus a direct link, at least on the attitudinal level, between
perceptions of inequality within demarcated welfare states on the one hand and global concerns on
the other. While beliefs about inequality and solidarity are the first indicators about the transnational
horizon of the social question, the issue of political agency looms large.
There are basically two options to address illegitimate social inequalities. The first is an
extension of social rights to members or citizens, as in the classical welfare state approach. The
second option is to provide budgets to support safety nets among those concerned. This latter
budgeting-based alternative is an economistic risk management approach and has been advocated, for
example, by the World Bank. It ties into the social protection provided by small groups (e.g. families)
for categories such as migrants. For example, NELM (Chapter 3) is based on the idea that migration
provides an informal social insurance against crop failure, that is, it is built on functioning safety nets
among migrants and their significant others. When looking at cross-border migration, transnationality
is important for understanding how agents, especially less powerful ones, move and deal with,
produce, and reproduce, inequalities.

The Assemblage of Regulations and their Reach

As to cross-border mobility, first, economic capital is fairly mobile. With respect to capital mobility,
the issues concerning social and labour standards have become a crucial site of debate and conflict
(Nathan, Reddy, and Kelkar 2008). In the transnational context, it is not social citizenship rights
which have become the norm of reference (as in national (welfare) states) but human rights which are
used to claim and to legitimize soft law in the form of social and labour standards, and human rights
which underpin social rights in national welfare states and supranational structures such as the EU.
Within the EU there is an emerging common basis for social and labour standards, which has guided
discussion on contentious issues, such as the posting of workers and employees abroad or self-
employment across borders (Schellinger 2015). Although there is no common standard, there is a
common frame of reference—which constitutes a far cry from effective social and labour regulation.
With respect to the relations between EU countries and the European periphery in Eastern Europe and
North Africa, however, the basis is much more tenuous.
Second, cross-border migration is changing the way national states conceptualize, grant, and
allocate their protection provisions. Citizenship in general and legal status in particular is a major
defining line of who gets what in states’ protection systems. Publicly sponsored social protection
fundamentally works at the national and supranational levels (i.e. European Union) and is based on
the assumption that the population is relatively sedentary or, among those who move within Europe, is
confined only to those who have specific citizenships, such as EU-member state citizens.
Nevertheless, transnational formations and dynamics—connecting not only persons and groups within
the EU but also to regions outside via mobility patterns—are essential to social protection both for
the movers and stayers at the crossroads of state-provided protection with interpersonal protective
resources. Families, friends, and extended kin play a major role in mobile persons’ lives, whether
they are the ones protecting or to be protected. Through cross-border migration transnational ties are
forged which bear obligations, responsibilities, and expectations that have consequences for the ways
in which social protection is organized within and across state borders. Implications include changing
norms, values, gender roles, and expectations, as well as inequalities among those interpersonal
networks.
Regulation of migration through international standards is important and has been developed by
the ILO and the international community since the 1930s. ILO conventions usually apply to all
workers, including migrant workers. In 1998, the ILO formulated four main principles for the
protection of workers’ rights: ‘freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to
collective bargaining; the elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labour; the effective
abolition of child labour; and the elimination of discrimination in respect to employment and
occupation’ (ILO 1998: 121; see also ILO 2010: 117). The 2004 ILO Multilateral Framework on
Labour Migration formulates ‘[n]on-binding principles and guidelines for a rights-based approach to
labour migration’ (ILO 2006). As of late 2008, a total of eighty countries had ratified at least one of
the three migrant worker conventions. To garner more ratifications, the ILO performs promotional
campaigns, provides technical cooperation with countries, and researches hindrances to ratification.
There have also been more domain-specific international conventions, for example, the Global
Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel by the World Health
Organization (WHO). Yet, in practice, there has not been much emphasis placed on protecting
developing country health systems from aggressive recruitment of their health professionals
(Martineau and Willets 2006).
From a migrant’s point of view two issues dominate access to social security. The first is the
tension between mobility of labour and the non-mobility of most entitlements. Hence, the question is
whether social security or elements thereof are portable across national borders (Taha, Siegmann, and
Messkoub 2015: 3). This issue is most relevant for those persons whose movements are temporary,
circular, or transient. The second issue is access to social protection outside the country of origin in
transit and immigration states. In this case it is the access to rights, often the entitlement of citizens vs.
those of non-members.
Portable social security can help address risks by offsetting the absence or changes in income for
the individual migrant or their family, especially if the migrant worker is away from the family. In
order to realize international conventions regarding migrant workers, there are at least four types of
relevant policy instruments (Taha, Siegman, and Messkoub 2013): (1) unilateral measures, where the
immigration country applies the same rights and standards to all migrant workers, regardless of
residence, citizenship, and immigration status; (2) bilateral agreements, which are signed between
two countries to coordinate the provision of social security entitlements, among other areas; (3)
multiple agreements, often signed by host countries with other states from which it experiences large
inflows of migrants, as did the USA with twenty-four high-income countries in 2009; (4) multilateral
agreements, usually agreed between a group of countries at the regional level, such as the Caribbean
Community (CARICOM) Reciprocal Agreement, and above all EU regulations EC Nos 883/2004 and
987/2009 (European Commission 2002).The schemes currently most advantageous to migrants for
benefit portability are bilateral social security agreements (preferably based on multilaterally agreed
standards), for instance, the EU regulations on European labour mobility, or the agreements between
the EU and the Maghreb countries.
 Bilateral and multilateral social security agreements aim to improve the access to and the
portability of social protection rights of migrants. Bilateral social security agreements usually do
away with nationality or residency requirements under provisions of non-discrimination between
nationals and migrants, along with rules of cooperation between the social security institutions of the
two countries. These have the task of coordinating the periods of contributions accumulated in both
countries, and then regulating the transfers and payment of the acquired entitlements. Most commonly,
such agreements only cover contributory long-term benefits like old age, disability, and survivor
pensions, but not health care benefits and purely tax-funded benefits, for example, social assistance or
maternity allowances. Obviously, migrants who participate in the informal labour market of the host
country have very limited access to social protection of any kind (Holzmann, Koettl, and Chernetsky
2005: 7). In general, the ratification of portability agreements makes a difference. Europe affords
social protection for 80 per cent of legal migrants because of international agreements; in South Asia
and sub-Saharan Africa the figure is zero and 4 per cent, respectively. Most countries in spaces 3 and
4 lack such agreements (Sabates-Wheeler and Feldman 2011). Still, one should not jump to
conclusions as to the implications of the provision of social protection too quickly, since social
protection provided by civil society associations and kinship groups is not included in these
considerations.
Overall, only 20 to 25 per cent of cross-border migrants work in host countries with bilateral or
multilateral social security agreements, which are crucial to avoid disadvantages with regard to
eligibility and replacement rates for pension benefits (Levitt et al. 2016). They guarantee full
portability of pension benefits, but not necessarily of health care benefits, to their home countries,
especially if the systems between host and home countries are very different. Around 50 per cent of
international migrants have access to their acquired benefits in the host country, but may face benefit
disadvantages in pensions or can access health benefits only in the former host, but not in the home
country. The remaining 25 per cent have either no legal access to benefits in the host country at all (5
per cent), or work in the informal economy of the host country (Holzmann, Koettl, and Chernetsky
2005; see Werding and McLennan 2011 on health insurance and health care).
In sum, North–North migrants, those moving within space 1, have the best access to social security
based on portability, due to the available bilateral agreements and multilateral frameworks. South–
North migrants, those moving from spaces 3 and 4 (partly also space 2) to space 1, are often dealing
with immigration discourses that frame them as (potential) welfare scroungers or even criminals,
even as they are providing much-needed labour to the respective immigration states. Political
authorities in both emigration and immigration states often encourage labour migrants to return to their
origin countries. Nonetheless, most governments realize that the lack of portability of social
protection benefits and potential losses from social security contributions are potential obstacles to
return migration. The concern for control of migration, however, dominates the rights of migrants,
such as freedom of movement and access to basic social rights.

Outlook: The Struggle for Rights in Cross-Border Fields

While the normative and sociological theories discussed give us some valuable hints for an empirical
analysis, they are not (yet) useful as general and comprehensive accounts of the (re)production of
social inequalities and the politics around it. Nonetheless, the theoretical approaches discussed
suggest that we need to conduct analysis on multiple scales (e.g. local, national, cross-border, global)
in order to capture how inequalities are (re)produced and ultimately politicized.
To take the transnational perspective further, it is necessary to find the conceptual language
appropriate to capture cross-border migration and social protection. On the national level, as T. H.
Marshall pointed out long ago, social rights and, above all, social citizenship are important for
legitimizing social inequalities arising out of capitalist markets. For transnational social spaces there
is no similar normative reference frame. ILO conventions 97 and 143 and other social and human
rights conventions suffer from a non-binding character. Thus, it does not make sense to speak of
‘transnational (social) citizenship’—except in the sense of overlapping national citizenships, namely
dual citizenship—in which case citizens are, in principle, able to access (quasi-)full rights in both
countries. Nor is it meaningful to speak of global or world citizenship in an institutional sense. World
citizenship is simply non-existent de facto or de jure because, apart from exceptions such as claims to
compensation for land loss in the case of development projects like dam-building (e.g. Ty, Van
Westen, and Zoomers 2013), only soft law or social rights apply in international conventions which
cannot be claimed successfully on a regular basis by migrants themselves. Transnationalized social
protection and concomitant social inequalities are dealt with on various levels, with national states as
well as international organizations or local municipalities playing a role—in addition to the other
dimensions of social organization, namely market, community, and family. Global criteria and norms
such as international conventions, and a global horizon of thinking as a cognitive schema, serve as
reference points for agents who strive for political change in social protection and migration. Despite
the fact that there are no coherent international regimes in the fields of social protection and
migration, there are identifiable global trends in meta-principles such as the postulates of equality and
democracy that show a shift in public awareness concerning transnational exchange, interdependence,
and dependencies, as well as rudimentary efforts to think about instruments for global social
protection (see, e.g. Cabrera 2011). The loci of struggles around social security remain determinedly
local and national, albeit intertwined across borders and within an emerging global horizon of what
are appropriate standards of social protection and legitimate social inequalities.

Notes
1. On the difficulties of publicly provided social protection for EU citizens migrating within the EU, see Carmel, Sojka, and Papiez 2016.
2. If we take a wide definition of migration, we could also speak of an implicit regime governing the mobility of tourists (Koslowski
2011).
3. http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ (accessed 25 February 2018).
5

Migration, Social Protection, and the (Re)Production of

Inequalities in the European Union

This chapter examines how social protection extends across the borders of national states,
exemplified by, for example, the social security of Dutch pensioners living in Spain, of former labour
migrants from Morocco in France returning to their region of origin, or of domestic care workers
from Ukraine working in German households. Also to be considered is the ensuing restructuration of
family life and care work in the regions of origin. A closer look at these cases reveals that social
protection is not necessarily provided and consumed within the territory of a single national state.
Rather, the increasing mobility and transnationality of persons affects how social protection is
organized (Faist 2014a). Yet in welfare states experiencing immigration and short-term mobility the
provision of social protection for migrants has often been precarious and contentious. In terms of
policy, in general, some member states of the EU have over the past years limited access to social
benefits for categories of migrants whose presence is not desired, such as asylum seekers. In the same
vein, the portability of pension and health benefits has remained stagnant (Vonk 2012).
The question posed here, with special reference to the EU in space 1 (OECD countries) and its
neighbours in other social spaces of social protection (see Table 4.1 in previous chapter), is how
inequalities are reproduced and how new inequalities emerge in the context of cross-border
migration, considering various scales of social protection, ranging from the state to non-state
organizations to families and friends. In other words, this analysis asks how efforts to provide social
security for cross-border migrants within and into the EU affect the reinforcement of existing
inequalities (e.g. between regions or within households) and the production of new lines of
inequalities (e.g. stratification of labour markets). Based on this grid it is possible to detail the social
mechanisms operative in cross-border forms of social protection—in particular, exclusion,
opportunity hoarding, hierarchization, and exploitation.
The field of social protection is significant because it is one of the policy areas in the EU that falls
predominantly under the purview of national member states. There is a tension, therefore, between
social rights that are valid throughout the EU, as also defined in the European Charter of Fundamental
Rights, on the one hand, and rights granted or withheld by very diverse and territorially limited
national welfare states on the other. We thus find two principles at odds with each other: freedom of
movement (Council Directive 2004/38) implies that social rights should follow the mobile person
(e.g. EU Directives 883/2004 and 987/2009), but each person belongs to a member state with respect
to residence and work (Carmel, Sojka, and Papiez 2016: 22). Another reason for the importance of
social protection is that social inequality, as measured by growing disparities between incomes
derived from wages, profit, and investment, within Europe has remained at a persistently high level
between the economic centres and peripheries, and has increased within individual member states
over the past two decades (Likić-Brborić 2011; Amelina 2017; see also Münch 2012). There are
even greater and more glaring disparities in income and life chances between the EU and its
periphery in Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East (Held and Kaya 2007). Yet another
reason for the importance of social protection is that migrants’ life opportunities, as measured by risk
of poverty or social exclusion, are fewer than those of non-migrants. This applies to both third-
country nationals and to migrants who are EU citizens. For example, in 2014, about 49 per cent of
adult non-EU migrants who resided in the EU-28 (EU member states) and about 28 per cent of EU
migrants were at risk of poverty and social exclusion, compared to about 23 per cent for non-migrant
EU citizens (Eurostat 2018). In short, migrants appear to be more prone to poverty, under-
employment, and unemployment (Emmenegger and Careja 2012). Moreover, social transfers across
the EU are less likely to elevate migrant households above the poverty line compared to citizen
households, which may be due to the fact that a smaller share of immigrants is covered by
contributory social insurance (Sainsbury 2010).
Overall, there is a clear socio-legal hierarchy between various types of migrants with respect to
legally sanctioned access to social rights and services. At the top tier are those migrants who are now
permanently established, because it usually takes a while to get full residence and employment rights
for EU citizens in other member states. The tier below is composed also of EU citizens in other
countries but those who could be called circular migrants. Often, the rules regulating the transfer of
contributions are complex, and this setup favours one-time migration, not repeat migration across the
borders of EU member states. In the third tier we find non-EU citizens, that is, extracommunitari,
who as a rule do not enjoy freedom of movement and have limited access to labour markets. Needless
to say, also in this third tier, we find various sub-categories. For example, highly qualified migrants
or intra-company transfers from privileged partners or those with associated status with the EU enjoy
better access to work, residency permits, and concomitant rights than those whose qualifications are
held to be low and who hail from the global South outside the EU.
Cross-border migration patterns within, into, and out of the EU have direct implications for
patterns of inequalities. In European post-Second World War history, the current moment of cross-
border movement is one which shows increasing complexity. The 1950s and 1960s were mostly
characterized by migration within and from the outside into Europe by social sub-stratification:
labour migrants entered the lowest rungs of the labour market while non-migrant workers experienced
upward mobility in a sort of elevator effect. Nowadays, there is also super-stratification with respect
to occupational hierarchies: highly skilled migrants whose human capital is desired now constitute a
crucial part of the mobile population in Europe.
In the post-Second World War period we can identify three historical phases in which new
directions and origins of migration from non-EU to EU countries occurred: (1) from 1945 to 1973
immigration proceeded mostly in the frame of guest-worker programmes and periphery–centre
relations (also from former colonies) in and into Europe—new immigration countries were added
subsequently, such as Spain, Portugal, and Greece; (2) in the aftermath of the transformations in
Eastern and Central Europe after 1989, migration from Eastern countries to Western EU countries
took off; (3) currently, the most relevant regions of origin for regular migration to Europe are non-EU
Europe, Asia, and North America (Eurostat 2016b), and for humanitarian and environment-related
migration Africa, Asia, and the Middle East (Eurostat 2016c). Many EU countries serve not only as
destination countries but also as transit and sending countries. The latter indicates that both intra-EU
and outflows from the EU to non-EU countries are also increasing (Eurostat 2016a).
Currently, Europe is mainly, though not exclusively, a region of immigration. Within the EU, data
on migrant stock (‘foreign born’) show that countries such as Belgium (15 per cent), Spain (13.4 per
cent), Germany (12.8 per cent), France (12 per cent), the Netherlands (11.6 per cent), and Italy (9.4
per cent), are somewhere in the middle of the pack. When looking outside the EU, figures in Western
Europe tend to be even higher, for example Switzerland with 28.3 per cent. Outside Europe, the
United States is close to average EU levels with 13.1 per cent. Higher stocks of immigration are
observed in Australia with 27.6 per cent and Canada with 20 per cent (OECD 2018, based on 2013
data).
In terms of numbers, regular migration is the largest form of migration to the EU. In 2015,
according to Eurostat, 34.3 million people who lived in an EU member state at the beginning of that
year were born outside of the EU-28. Moreover, 18.5 million persons were born in a different EU
member state to the one in which they were resident (Eurostat 2016a). Statistical information
indicates that migrants from outside Europe have become increasingly important in terms of numbers
in recent years. Accordingly, residence permits issued for international labour migrants from non-EU
countries increased by 35 per cent between 2011 and 2015 (Eurostat 2016b). Moreover, humanitarian
migration has increased by more than 300 per cent between 2011 and 2015 (Eurostat 2016c).
Although comprehensive statistics do not exist, there is evidence suggesting that irregular migration
has also increased. The combined number of apprehensions and orders of leave increased by 125 per
cent between 2008 and 2015 (Eurostat 2016d). However, this number reflects only registered
irregular migrants and does not include an approximation of the complete numbers. According to an
estimate by the Clandestino project, the number of irregular migrants in the EU might have reached
3.9 million in 2008 (Clandestino 2009).

European Policies on Migration and Citizenship

In order to understand how social inequalities are implicated in the provision of social protection, let
us look first at how Europe as a quasi-polity regulates entry through migration policies and how
membership status can be conceived in this supranational realm. Both admission and integration
contexts shape the legal position migrants have in order to partake in social citizenship.
Migration policies in Europe have in the past been shaped by a diverse group of actors at different
levels of governance and in different spheres of society. In response to a growing awareness of the
significance of the issue, efforts to arrive at a joint European agenda on migration have increased.
This contested agenda can be subsumed in four elements. The first element aims to improve the
control of European borders, including measures concerning the outer borders of the EU, as well as to
save migrants’ lives on their journey and to prevent human smuggling. For this purpose the EU Border
Agency Frontex was established in 2004 and has recently been upgraded to the European Border and
Coast Guard Agency in response to the 2015 migratory situation. The second element is concerned
with reducing incentives for irregular migration by addressing its ‘root causes’, again taking action
against human smuggling, and encouraging return to countries of origin. Measures to achieve this aim
include prioritizing cooperation with third countries and thus externalizing control and responsibility
toward neighbours of the EU (see Chapter 7), for instance under the Global Approach to Migration
and Mobility (GAMM) in 2005 and more recently under the new Partnership Framework.
Strengthening the common asylum policy constitutes the third pillar. It is based on the governance of
reception conditions, asylum procedures, and the Dublin procedures. In brief, the country in which
asylum seekers arrive is responsible for processing the asylum request. Over recent years the sharing
of responsibility has been the most contentious policy area among the EU member states. The fourth
element is the development of a new policy on legal migration. In the context of labour market
shortages and demographic shifts in many European societies, efforts are being made to attract highly
skilled migrants and to facilitate their integration into the labour market and into society. Since the
Treaty of Lisbon in the early 2000s, the EU has conceived of itself as a knowledge society (Kapur
and McHale 2005). This element is closely linked to a claim that the benefits of migration for
development in migrants’ countries of origin are also being maximized.
These efforts to develop a common European approach with respect to the challenges and
opportunities related to migration have recently been questioned by ambitions for a return to greater
national sovereignty. Such was the case, for instance, when several member states, in response to the
large numbers of refugees arriving in Europe in 2015, reintroduced border controls limiting the free
movement of people within the Schengen Area and temporarily suspended the Dublin Regulation, a
state of affairs which has led to tensions and mistrust among member states.
After 9/11 and various terrorist attacks in the 2000s, more than ever, migration into and partly
within the EU is dealt with as an issue of security, especially with respect to forced migration. Less
contentiously, migration has also been presented by governments and employer associations as an
issue of welcoming highly skilled migrants. Not surprisingly, issues of social protection have not
figured prominently, as this policy area is one of the least supranationalized. It is therefore of prime
importance to understand membership rules and access to social rights and thus protection.
Nonetheless, there are rules for mobility and transfer of social benefits within the EU.
As we have seen, mobility even within the EU and the principle that rights follow the migrant may
clash with the principle of social protection benefits based on residence and national citizenship.
This is true even for the supranational version of citizenship called European citizenship. Basically,
there are two forms of citizenship reaching beyond and below the national state. The first is
overlapping, best visualized in citizenship as circles which overlap each other. Dual or multiple
citizenship in national states is a prominent example. The second form is nested, consisting of
concentric circles: a person may be a citizen of Lisbon, Portugal, and the EU. This latter form of
nested citizenship includes city-level or local citizenship (Faist 2001).
The concept of nested membership means that membership in the EU has multiple sites and that
there is an interactive system of politics, policies, and rights between the sub-state, state, interstate,
and supra-state levels. The web of governance networks allows for enshrining (currently a few)
social rights on the supra-state level, interconnecting them with old ones, and—above all—re-
adapting rights and institutions in existing member states. In the near future, it is unlikely that the EU
will become a federal political system like those found in its member states. Therefore, we cannot
speak of EU citizenship as fully fledged federal citizenship. What has evolved in the EU is an
extraordinarily intricate network of nested authorities and attendant rights.
The specific characteristics of nested citizenship are as follows. First, nested membership implies
multiple political and administrative levels. The political actors—including sovereign member states,
the EU Commission, the Council of Ministers, lobby groups, and citizens’ associations—are involved
in activities at different levels. Second, nested citizenship is a form of federative membership. A
simple co-existence of different levels does not exist; European Union citizenship as a whole is sited
in various governance levels. An important consequence is that nested citizenship is not smoothly
evolving to a truly federal citizenship. The sovereignty of member states in granting citizenship on the
state level carries far-reaching implications for the slow evolution of a more coherent EU citizenship,
and the resilience of member states against it. Take the example of free movement. Argentinians with
Italian ancestry might have reclaimed the citizenship of their ancestors and moved to the EU—but not
necessarily to their country of citizenship in the EU. Survey evidence on naturalization processes in
Italy, for instance, finds that better opportunities for moving to other countries was the second most
chosen reason for wanting to obtain Italian citizenship (Codini and D’Odorico 2007). Or take the
example of Hungary extending citizenship to co-ethnics in Serbia, or the ease with which Moldavians
seem to have access to Romanian citizenship, and therefore citizenship in the European Union and
associated mobility rights. In all these cases member states in the EU other than the ones mentioned
could (have) object(ed). These complexities constitute one of the factors slowing down the
harmonization of citizenship laws or even the unification of citizenship within the EU. The ability of
member states to regulate admission to state citizenship stands in stark contrast to their growing
inability to define who is considered a ‘worker’ and thus able to cross borders freely and engage in
economic activities. Access to member-state citizenship is an instrument wielded by the now semi-
sovereign member states to fend off continued encroachment of EU case law on access to their labour
markets. Member states try to offset their sovereignty losses concerning the free movement of labour
by protecting their exclusive right to naturalization. The third characteristic of nested citizenship is
that it cannot be thought of as membership guided by a coherent or even centralized centre of political
authority. As opposed to citizenship in federal political systems such as the Federal Republic of
Germany (not to speak of unitary systems), the highest level of the EU should not be understood as the
primary centre of political authority standing above the sub-state systems. The multi-tiered
governance network of the EU is better understood as a loose federal system.
Despite declarations of a move towards a ‘Social Europe’ in the 1990s and early 2000s—
designed to uphold social rights and protection at a high level within the EU—it has become quite
evident that the opening and integration of markets has been advancing steadily while processes of
regulation and redistribution to deal with the effects of market integration have been much slower and
have lagged far behind (Barr 2005). Until the 1980s, member states were unwilling to delegate social
policy prerogatives to the EU, evidenced in the meagre list of EU-level programmes—which
included male–female labour market equality, weak regional development commitments, and
expensive welfare subsidies to farmers. Key policy areas have been left in national hands, such as
pensions, health care, unemployment, and poverty alleviation. Since then, market liberalization,
characterized by the supremacy of the free market and competition rules, has been accompanied by
health and safety regulations, expanded regional redistribution programmes, and efforts to promote
European-level collective bargaining. Yet, again, these efforts did not get very far. The latest turn has
been reliance on soft law to regulate labour markets, pensions, and poverty, the Open Coordinating
Mechanism (OCM). Some observers interpret this development as an indication of a ‘positive
coordination’ in the EU. Their cautious optimism refers to the beginnings of supra-state political
integration with the potential for federalization at several governance levels (Dwyer and Shaw 2013:
162). However, other analysts continue to warn against an increasing discrepancy between economic
integration and social welfare, because the rapid pace of economic integration is not paralleled by
advances in social policy and social legislation (Offe 2014). The lack of progress and the resistance
of member states to policy sovereignty pooled at the EU level can be explained, among other reasons,
by the high stakes national governments have had in policy sovereignty and by the fact that welfare
states are the products of nationally specific constellations, deeply embedded in solutions to
contentious political issues around citizenship solidarity and complex historical trajectories of
national identities, in this case the meanings that social and specific reciprocity may have (Barbier
2014).
Despite little harmonization with respect to citizenship, social rights, and labour market
regulations, there is a discernible model of Social Europe which is based on EU citizenship as
market-based citizenship. It aims at a flexible workforce, which is able to be deployed quickly.
Ultimately, this image goes some way toward a neo-liberal economic ideal since the workforce
ideally moves wherever it is used most efficiently and leaves when the work is finished (Leerkes
2016). It is a move toward a pan-European labour market.
The ability of migrants to take advantage of existing regulations between emigration and
immigration states in transnational European social spaces is highly uneven. For many citizens of EU
member states, portability of certain benefits is possible, especially with respect to pensions and
health. In general, however, the linkages of social security systems across borders are tenuous at best
for the majority of migrants from outside the EU. Most third-country citizens, including undocumented
migrants, come from states that have weak social protection institutions, and they are less able to
draw upon bi- or multilateral agreements regulating the portability of benefits; hence the increased
need to combine public and private forms of social protection, and, if possible, to combine social
protection from various states. This is also necessary in the rare case when, for example, diaspora
policies from countries of origin (mostly outside the EU) are designed to provide for migrants. Such
programmes, with few exceptions, usually cater exclusively to the needs of emigrants abroad. What
also needs to be looked at more closely is the in-between category of EU citizens who, in principle,
are able to enjoy portable social rights but may, de facto, not have access to all benefits, as
exemplified by certain categories of workers in the construction sector.

Cross-Border Social Protection of Migrants in the EU: The Cases of Care and
Construction

Strategies for cross-border mobility create social protection links between countries and locales of
origin, transit, destination, and onward migration. The relevant regulations in the social and migration
policies of these countries do not, however, constitute a coherent cross-border scheme for social
protection, because accessibility and entitlement to social benefits in national welfare states are
(still) determined by policies directed at migrants (Dörr and Faist 1997). It is the demand for workers
that shapes the issuance of work permits and, hence, the migration or mobility of people from, for
example, Central and East European states to Southern and Western Europe. Based on these
considerations, it is helpful to take a closer look at two sectors to illustrate the (re)production of
inequalities in the field of social protection. Care and construction have been selected, given the fact
that the market for cross-border employment opportunities has expanded rapidly in these sectors.
Care and domestic work usually takes place within families while the organization of such
activities often traverses borders (Zechner 2008). This kind of work comprises a whole complex of
activities that fulfil the day-to-day living requirements for sustaining health and welfare. Nowadays,
care and domestic work—both within the traditional, family context as well as the commercialized
form—is a field in which primarily female cross-border workers are employed. Their preponderance
is accounted for partly by the fact that in OECD countries the proportion of women in formal
employment is on the increase, with the consequence that women in the core countries are no longer
available to carry out care and domestic work to the same degree as before (Yeates 2008). For this
reason, care work has meanwhile become an expanding employment sector—according to the ILO,
around one hundred million cross-border migrants worldwide are in paid employment in this field—
and the number of elderly people in need of care increases as more and more women decide to enter
the employment market for industrial, commercial, or clerical work (ILO 2010). As a general trend,
owing in part to the fundamental restructuring of labour markets, there are proportionally more
positions for women in the service sector in immigration countries of the global North, and there are
fewer opportunities for legal labour migration which normally includes the right to family
reunification in one place. Over the past two decades family reunification in European countries has
become more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming for immigrants from non-EU countries (Bettio,
Villa, and Simonazzi 2006). Domestic work and long-term care of the elderly have become
increasingly commodified in certain EU member states and other wealthy countries. Examples include
the establishment of old-age care facilities for elderly people from Germany in Eastern Europe, such
as in Poland, and in Southeast Asia, for example in Thailand (Böcker, Horn, and Schweppe 2017:
232). Commodification would suggest an increased role of market principles but also stronger
involvement of civil society or community and family to make up for the lack of rights provided by
states, especially in cross-border transactions concerning forms of social protection such as care.
Another prime example of commodification can be found in the transnationalized construction
sector. Increasingly since the early 1990s, a significant number of workers in this sector are not
workers in the classic sense of the word (Faist 1997), but workers who are self-employed in legal
terms. Contract workers are the employees of subcontractors, who carry out a contract for a prime
contractor under the freedom to provide services in the EU or in the context of bilateral agreements
with third countries. Many of these posted workers are EU citizens. Legal privileges enjoyed by EU
citizen workers over extracommunitari does not mean that the former do not experience
discrimination. Despite the EU’s Posted Workers Directive which is meant to ensure a minimum of
rights, there is a veritable protection gap. Since the country of origin’s social legislation primarily
applies to posted workers, such workers are partially outside the regulatory scope of law of the
receiving country (Lillie 2016).

Mechanisms of Inequality in Cross-Border Social Protection

Given the setup just sketched, four exemplary and general mechanisms involved in the reproduction of
inequalities are discussed here: (1) exclusion through membership rules; (2) opportunity hoarding
through closure in job networks; (3) hierarchization through ranking (migrant) workers in the
workplace and in the public sphere; and (4) exploitation through asymmetrical power relations in
places such as homes or construction sites and between immigration and emigration regions. The first
two mechanisms, exclusion and opportunity hoarding, can be derived from Max Weber’s concept of
social closure, referring to the efforts of a powerful group (in-group) to exclude less powerful groups
(out-groups) from the benefits of joint enterprises (Weber 1968 [1922]: 341–3). The third mechanism,
hierarchization, is based on the idea of a ranking of institutionalized positions and roles in
combination with access to specific rights and resources, to be expanded by informal and cultural
role systems (Therborn 2014). Finally, exploitation obviously builds on Karl Marx’s theory of the
capitalist labour process, which refers to the exclusion of one group from the resulting benefits of
cooperation between two groups, without giving the weaker group its due share (Tilly 2005: 74).
All the mechanisms mentioned depend on categorizations of people along heterogeneities, in other
words, differences between individuals and groups—for example ethnicity, race, age, religion, and
gender—and transnationality. Categorical distinctions are involved in mechanisms creating
inequalities such as stigmatization and racialization (Lamont, Beljean, and Clair 2014). They are
manifested in the unequal distribution of (material and non-material) resources, relational life
chances, and life conditions (Bourdieu 1984).

Exclusion
At the national level, immigration and citizenship policy measures are decisive with respect to
membership. At the EU level, legal affiliation to a state and, hence, full membership in the sense of
equal rights for state citizens (e.g. social rights) and Union citizens (e.g. freedom to travel and right of
establishment in EU member states) are important because they facilitate cross-border travel and thus
ensure a higher degree of transnationality in terms of cross-border mobility and the portability of
social benefits. For example, when Romania—one of the major suppliers of care workers for Italy
and Spain but also for countries such as Germany—became a member state of the EU in 2002, short-
stay visa requirements for Romanians were lifted and other obstacles also removed. By contrast,
Ukraine—another important source of care workers—has remained a third country, with all the
consequences this has entailed for social positions and life chances. Citizenship of an EU member
country, and consequently freedom to travel, thus changed the situation considerably for the mobility
of hired care workers. Romanian minors are able to visit their mothers working as carers in Italy
more frequently than their Ukrainian peers are able to, which, as one might expect, has affected trust
relationships between mothers and their children (Piperno 2007). Moreover, female Romanian
workers, as EU citizens, who are engaged as what might be called long-term circular migrants, enjoy
greater legal security with respect to employment status in comparison to Ukrainian women workers.
In terms of inequality, this means that migrants to Italy or Germany from Romania and Ukraine have
different options when it comes to freedom of travel or access to social services.
In general, while EU citizens are from the outset entitled as employees to largely the same social
rights in other member states, this is not the case for citizens of third countries, who can claim
entitlement only if they have secured residence and employment and have thus attained what can be
termed denizen status. Problems arise with respect to the social protection of non-citizens, large
numbers of whom are residents but often do not have full social rights (Morris 2002). It already
becomes clearly observable at this point that as far as social rights are concerned, there is some
coordination at the EU level of national legal entitlements for EU citizens (e.g. in the form of the
portability of social entitlements across state borders), while for extra-communitarians their status
depends on respective bi-national agreements, if there are any.
The differential access to rights between EU citizens on the one hand and third-country nationals
on the other, becomes quite visible in the case of pensioners moving abroad upon retirement. This is a
growing group: already one in ten Dutch state old-age pensions are paid to retirees living abroad
(Balkır and Böcker 2015). Take, for example, two categories of retirement migration from the
Netherlands to Turkey, namely former Turkish labour migrants who return to the country of origin and
Dutch citizens not of Turkish origin. The latter are privileged because they can take advantage of legal
prerogatives, such as freedom of mobility in the EU. For both groups, migration decisions evolve
according to life course considerations, and therefore the provisions each of the respective states
offers matter a great deal. This is one of the reasons why even those Dutch citizens who have settled
permanently in Turkey try to keep their permanent residency in the Netherlands. Both categories can
be seen as settled migrants, but only the Dutch citizens have viable return options to the Netherlands.
This double residency is usually not possible for Turkish labour migrants who have worked and lived
in the Netherlands but are not Dutch citizens.
Clearly, legal status based on national state membership has an effect on inequalities in terms of
resources: one example is time that could be spent looking after one’s family members rather than
standing in long queues outside consulates to obtain a visa; thus, brokerage between bureaucracy and
potential migrants to obtain visas helps to overcome hurdles and, at the same time, reproduces group
and class boundaries (see Alpes 2011). With respect to inclusion and exclusion, membership in
groups and participation in networks are also important beyond migration itself because, among other
things, these provide and facilitate access to jobs, accommodation, and childcare. For migrants
working in the service sector, clique and group membership is crucial not only in the search for work,
but also for making childcare arrangements, to ensure care of their children while they are abroad, or
care of older relatives who have been left at home (Kofman and Raghuram 2010).
However, it would be short-sighted to attribute exclusionary effects above all to rigid legal
distinctions along EU citizens vs. extracommunitari. In the case of construction workers, for
example, pseudo-self-employment is a way for contractors to ensure flexibility in deploying the
needed workforce to construct buildings on time. Hence we also need to be aware of legal
categorizations which enable the division of the EU citizen workforce. The often pseudo-self-
employed workers are subject to directives, work in precarious conditions, and are barely able to
make regular social protection contributions for their families in their country of origin. The share of
(dependent) self-employed workers in the construction sector in West European states has increased
dramatically since the early 1990s (Faist et al. 1999), particularly since the accession of Central and
East European countries to the EU and the consequent free movement of workers from these countries.
A large percentage of these (pseudo) self-employed workers are not, or not sufficiently, covered by
social insurance. Specifically, conditions of dependent self-employment are such that the employer
can evade rules on matters like protection against dismissal or making fixed-term contracts
permanent. Labour laws often do not apply, because private law contracts are involved, which means
that in contractual terms workers who are effectively subject to directives from employers are treated
as non-tariff, self-employed workers (European Parliament 2013b). Dependent self-employment is a
form of work relationship in which the worker is formally self-employed, but under comparable
conditions to those of dependent employees. This kind of legal status is to be found not only in the
construction sector but also in the transport sector, in the insurance sector, throughout the service
sector, and in the advertising industry. One of the long-term consequences of this state of affairs is that
these workers do not have adequate retirement provision.

Opportunity Hoarding
Opportunity hoarding (Tilly 2005: 153–70) pertains to the preferential inclusion of one’s own people
to ensure that the members of a group, for instance from the same home town or of a support network,
benefit from recommendations for jobs or social services. In this way, opportunity hoarding is very
similar to a mechanism called ‘network externalities’ (Garip 2017), that is, social and symbolic ties
within groups which help sustain institutionalized resources, such as HTAs, smuggling networks, or
migrant enclaves in destination countries, which, in turn, tend to foster an even higher concentration of
resources within and to a given group. Opportunity hoarding is heavily gendered. Migrant networks,
for example, have been found to operate in gendered ways, with male migrants facilitating the
outmigration of other men, and female migrants helping other women (Curran et al. 2005).
All of these formations give rise to inequality through categorizations relating to access to jobs
and social protection and, hence, income and other benefits for members of other groups. Opportunity
hoarding is a mechanism that leads to monopolization. Monopolies are created and defended with
ascriptions such as stereotyping and stigmatization, by categorizing others as ‘lazy’ or ‘uneducated’.
Opportunity hoarding is often accompanied by exploitation, for example when relatives are held
under forced labour conditions in the context of sponsored immigration and forced to work to pay off
the immigration expenses (Tilly 1978). At the same time, groups of similar origin who are segregated
in workplaces may find a basis for protective collective action: in light of the commodification of
work, workers are able to fight for better opportunities and better tariffs only if they combine and
cohere. One of the safest ways of doing so is with colleagues from back home—seen in exemplary
ways by strikes among undocumented workers (‘sans-papiers’, Barron et al. 2011). The UK also
provides examples of irregular migrants who have organized and fought for recognition (Anderson
2010: 63). All of these are important instances of the struggle for rights: rights have to be seized
(Kivisto and Faist 2007: 4). Eventually, the question to ask is how ‘whose inequality?’ and ‘whose
equality?’ relate to each other.
A clear example of the ambiguity of opportunity hoarding, already in the process of migration
decision-making, is how gendered scripts prevalent in Philippine society are used by women who
seek to migrate to various destinations, including Europe. Before any individual migratory action is
taken, a household-level migration negotiation usually occurs over an individual family member’s
migration aspiration: ‘Rather than attempting to “undo” gender, these women reframe their migration
aspirations as a duty, rather than a right, to migrate, and a logical extension of their traditional,
supporting roles as daughters, wives, sisters, and/or mothers’ (Paul 2015: 271). On a societal level,
this rhetoric is akin to ‘Asian feminism’. The governments of Asian countries foster patriarchal
relations, which support female labour market participation for the sake of economic efficiency.
However, women are expected to assume an inferior role in their kinship groups towards male
members. Women manoeuvring the decision-making process skilfully employ patriarchal relations for
gaining freedom to move.
To increase the potential for opportunity hoarding with regard to cross-border social protection
strategies, the degree of transnationality plays a role. If a high degree of transnationality obtains—that
is, if there is a high density of cross-border contacts, regular consignments of goods and money, and
visits abroad and even multiple nationalities—there is a high probability that social protection within
families and friendship cliques is organized across borders. When there is a low degree of
transnationality, on the other hand, local networks in the country of destination play a stronger role.
This proposition is corroborated by the detailed analysis of social protection strategies in different
categories of cross-border workers in the Turkish–German (e.g. labour migrants and refugees),
Polish–German (e.g. EU migrants and seasonal workers), and Kazakh–German (e.g. ethnic Germans)
transnational spaces in the areas of old-age provision, health care, education, and childcare. This
holds for both circular and settlement patterns of cross-border mobility (see Chapter 6 for more
details).
 Yet, a high degree of transnationally oriented forms of social protection may have ambiguous
effects. Take the example of the temporary placement of children in the hands of relatives for care for
long periods. Ethnographic studies not only in Europe but in various parts of the world—Latin
America, Africa, and Southeast Asia—suggest that women who migrate to seek employment in
another country usually leave their children in the care of substitute mothers or grandmothers and
other relatives, but seldom in the care of the fathers (e.g. Parreñas 2005). Depending on the care
providers’ resources, such practices may perpetuate inequalities inasmuch as they restrict their
children’s autonomy and, hence, their potential for development. Moreover, for those who went
abroad as migrants, feelings of reciprocity and solidarity may change, with implications for
obligations. After all, it is easier to withdraw from obligations when claims are made by those left
behind over long distance rather than face-to-face (Benda-Beckmann 2015).

Hierarchization
There are also limitations of legal status in understanding inequalities. Despite the lifting of access
restrictions to labour markets in the EU in 2014, the employment situation for mobile citizens from
Romania, Bulgaria, or Poland in Southern European member states has still not improved
significantly in terms of working conditions or income (as is often the case in the informal sector; see
Recchi and Triandafyllidou 2010: 141). Hierarchizations thus also do exist among workers from EU
countries. In Italy or Spain, for instance, job opportunities for East European citizens are mainly
restricted to jobs categorized as low skilled and low paid. This constitutes a downgrading from
‘mobile’ workers across borders within the EU to ‘migrants’ (i.e. extra-communitarians), and
applies equally to employees in care and domestic work, the construction industry, and many other
services and sectors. These workers function—just like many other extra-communitarians—as a
kind of flexible reserve army of labour (see Castellani 2018). A specific case of hierarchization is
racialization. For example, care work is frequently associated with docility as a characteristic of the
respective workers. In this case, phenotypical features are frequently imbued with particular
meanings, such as docility at work. A case in point is, for example, Filipina care workers in several
European countries (e.g. Shinozaki 2015).
The foundation of hierarchization is the valuation and grading of certain kinds of work, such as
care and domestic work, as ‘unqualified’. As a rule, domestic and care work is associated with low-
skilled, gender-, and often race-specific employment, not least because in the regions where many of
these female workers come from such work is not yet commercialized on such a wide scale. In fact,
many of the women from Eastern Europe or the Philippines, for instance, are qualified, skilled
workers who completed their vocational training in their home country (Baggio 2008). In a modified
form, this pattern can also be identified in the construction sector. On large construction sites in
particular, where the production methods are organization-oriented and the prime contractors shun
employing their own teams of skilled workers, subcontractors (from other countries) who can provide
trained, skilled workers are in demand (Faist et al. 1999).
One of the semantic mechanisms of inequality production can be found in the devaluation of
migrant mothers by way of scandalmongering in the mass media in some countries of origin. In recent
years, the departure of mothers from Central and Eastern Europe who take up work as migrants in
Western and Southern European countries has been the subject of debate in particular. Newspapers
and journals have reported on ‘Euro-orphans’ or ‘social orphans’ whose alleged bad mothers decided
to go to the West to seek personal fulfilment through paid employment, without taking into account the
negative effects that this apparently had on their defenceless children (Pustułka 2012). Such
categorizations result in devaluation in terms of social status, in this case good or bad parenthood.
What is occluded is that the feminization of migration in care is mainly a result of blocked social
upward mobility in the countries of origin (see Sørensen and Guarnizo 2007). Furthermore, empirical
research based on more differentiated evaluations shows that diverse strategies are used in the
context of transnational motherhood or transnational fatherhood to alleviate the distress of physical
separation, ranging from occasional phone calls and visits home to bringing the children and other
dependents to join them in the country of immigration (Boccagni 2012).
Many female carers and male construction workers employed in Western and Southern Europe
also display a high degree of transnationality in terms of communication practices for purposes of
staying in touch with their families, and in particular with their children. Most of the research in this
field indicates, however, that the new care-givers, for instance grandmothers, in the countries of
origin are themselves often overburdened with work (Pérez Orozco 2009). The care situation for
those members of transnationally dispersed families in the target countries is often equally
precarious. While migrants provide care and assistance in their employers’ households, the care of
their own children falls by the wayside, because their employment does not allow them to take care of
them, too.
Hierarchization also occurs with respect to migrant categories, for example in dualistic ranking. In
policy documents and in public media reporting in countries such as Germany the transnationality of
the so-called highly skilled is frequently praised, whereas the transnationality of labour migrants is
considered problematic (Faist and Ulbricht 2015). There is what could be called ‘good’
transnationality in public debates, for example the mobility of the highly qualified. One pattern of
interpretation is that the mobility of highly skilled professionals contributes to increased national
economic competitiveness. The successful attraction of global talent is thus part of a narrative aimed
at modernizing the national economy and boosting national pride. This narrative brings together the
usually unconnected elements of economic efficiency and national cultural pride. Alternatively, there
is ‘bad’ transnationality, as expressed in debates on cross-border practices such as the importation of
brides and bridegrooms from Turkey to Germany, practices that are held to run counter to the
integration of Turkish immigrants. In this case it is the cultural modernity of German society which is
juxtaposed to the traditional and backward behaviour of immigrants. In addition to this clear
hierarchization, also visible in other European countries, there are sometimes unspoken assumptions
about the implications of the migration of the highly skilled for social protection and the national
welfare state. It is often assumed that this category constitutes less of a drain on the coffers of the
welfare state than ‘poverty migrants’ (Ulbricht 2017). And one particular category of migrants,
refugees, has been an object of constant policy change on issues such as the length of time after which
work permits are granted, and the subject of debate over whether provisions in kind or in cash are
most appropriate to deter those ‘bogus’ asylum seekers who allegedly come only to collect benefits.

Exploitation
From the point of view of employees, exploitation can be observed when employers in immigration
countries violate standards of fair and legitimate practice. In relational terms, workers in irregular
domestic employment, including even those without official residence permits, forgo the opportunity
to use legal channels to enforce their claims because they are faced with the dilemma of working in
exploitative positions in the informal sector or risking expulsion because of their illegal residence
status, even if the employer is violating labour law. The violation of equality norms such as equal
tariffs, as set out in numerous conventions of the International Labour Organization (e.g. ILO
Conventions 97 and 143; see Chapter 4), has given rise to the discussion of such employment
relations in public forums like the International Labour Conference (ILO 2010). Moreover, there are
sectoral distinctions in terms of inequality. For instance, it is far more difficult to carry out
inspections under labour law regulations in households or on construction sites than in fixed business
premises. There are also differences among European countries. In states with comparatively highly
deregulated labour markets, such as Spain, the care sector and construction industries actually serve
as important means of access to the formal employment market, which is enhanced by occasional
regularization campaigns for migrants with irregular legal status (Leon 2010).
A closer analysis of the exploitation mechanism suggests that social inequalities as a rule do not
relate to one dimension of heterogeneity alone. In employers’ households, for example, inequality
increases and interacts along gender, class, and ethnic lines when migrants enter the households as
domestic employees. The employment of labour migrants does not reduce gender inequalities in
households: while the division of labour between men and women is altered by the presence of
exploited, mainly female migrants, the employment of migrant domestic servants creates new
inequality patterns. Middle-class women relieved from domestic work are now in a position to
pursue their careers more consistently and in this way help break down the gender-specific patterns
of participation in certain sections of the formal employment markets (Nakano Glen 1992), above all
in the public sector. The production of inequalities in households in immigration countries and the
improvement of the status of women in formal employment markets in such countries are interrelated
through transnational processes in which ethnic, racial, class, and gender categorizations abound. One
of the backdrops of the increased employment of domestic workers in many European countries since
the 1980s has been the feminization of the labour market, not least fostered by market-creating
policies of the EU. These processes have led to the demise of the breadwinner/care-giver model,
under which mothers were expected to stay home with their children, and has given way to the dual-
earner model, under which mothers are now expected to enter the labour force (cf. Pfau-Effinger
2005). A note of caution is in order: not all care employment relationships are of an exploitative kind,
not only because of legal regulations but also because the power relations between employer and
employee are often complex in a reciprocal relationship (Ambrosini 2013).
On a macro-institutional scale exploitation manifests itself in a two-way redistribution between
regions. To take an example, numerous care workers who emigrate from Eastern Europe to Western
and Southern Europe to work in private households are in fact trained nurses who received training in
their countries of origin (Lutz 2010). Instances of the brain drain and brawn drain are also observable
in other sectors such as the construction industry. Sometimes there are cascades of drain, as in the
construction industry: while up to a third of the Portuguese labour force in construction worked
abroad in other European countries, construction sites in Portugal were filled with workers from
Angola or Mozambique (Buckley et al. 2016). As a consequence, investments by the regions of origin
in occupational training are lost, and there are even labour shortages in the respective fields in the
regions of origin. To a certain extent this is the case in countries to which workers do not immigrate,
but from which workers only emigrate to work in the domestic sector of European countries, as is the
case in Central Asian countries like Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan.
At a regional level, financial remittances from the destination country to the country of origin, one
of the manifestations of transnationality, do not offset the losses described above. There is no clear
evidence of a reduction of inequalities among households, at least not in the short term, particularly in
the regions of origin, although there is evidence that remittances do have poverty-reducing effects at
the household level (Skeldon 1997; Chapter 3). Of course, not all households in the regions of
emigration participate in international migration. And social class and networking through migration
networks exert a considerable influence on the type of mobility of those who do migrate. One may
deduce from this stratification that in emigration regions not everyone benefits to the same degree
from return remittances. While it is extremely difficult to provide evidence of the trickle-down and
multiplier effects of money transfers beyond the participating households, it can be stated with
certainty that the governments of the countries of origin benefit from remittances. Worldwide, almost
half of all bank remittances in the currency of the countries of employment are transferred to the
central bank of the country of origin, which in turn pays the money in the currency of the country of
emigration to the bank of the receiving family (Guarnizo 2003).
The crucial issue with respect to inequalities is the consequences for the distribution of resources
and the power asymmetries between migrants abroad who provide financial remittances on the one
hand, and those who stayed behind and are the alleged beneficiaries of these transfers on the other.
The by-now-voluminous literature on these processes does not give us a clear-cut picture of the
beneficiaries and losers (cf. DeWind and Holdaway 2008). What is certain, however, is that the
struggles around projects financed with transfers from immigration regions are often quite similar to
those encountered in development cooperation more generally (cf. Rottenburg 2009). This is
especially true if migrant associations participate in development projects as collective actors
(Orozco and Rouse 2007). Migrant organizations, such as HTAs, frequently try to establish
themselves as development agents, a role which has changed the understanding of the term diaspora
from organizations of exiles dependent on and supported by superpowers during the Cold War to
development actors since then. In Europe, such associations are sponsored by programmes including
the EC–UN Joint Migration Development Initiative (JMDI) Migration 4 Development, a programme
supporting small-scale organizations in their efforts to link migration and development. Although the
collective remittances usually pale in comparison to those on the family level, the former are
important because civil society organizations engage in opportunity hoarding. A transnational
perspective makes cross-border transactions for the most part translocal, that is, local-to-local
relationships across state borders. Examples are numerous, and civil society actors come in diverse
forms, such as HTAs in the case of Mexico, Turkey, and Cameroon, returnee associations in Jamaica,
and charitable foundations in Egypt. Such associations provide significant resources for community
development at the local level by, for example, providing construction materials for their home-town
church, raising money to improve water and sewage systems or health and education services, helping
to organize relief efforts following natural disasters, and channelling financial remittances for care or
coverage of health insurance of non-mobile persons in the regions of migrants’ origin.

Outlook: Persisting Inequalities

The evidence on work and social protection in transnational social spaces in Europe and its
neighbours suggests that the exertions of migrants and their dependents frequently reinforce old
inequalities and generate new ones. While cross-border social protection strategies can substantially
improve the livelihoods of individuals or families and the opportunities for social protection, for
example, through remittances for the education or health care of other family members, fundamental
inequalities between the regions of origin and the target regions but also within origin groups tend to
persist. Institutionally embedded forms of public social protection in the regions of origin are often
exposed to additional pressures, for instance, through the migration of skilled workers. New
inequalities arise in the course of cross-border migration, for example between households in the
regions of origin that receive remittances and those that do not, or in the gender-specific division of
labour in the immigration regions, where the emancipation of women in the immigration countries
results in women from peripheral countries taking over the vacant positions for care work in the
household.
The results of the foregoing analysis cast doubt on the positive insurance role of migration, as
sometimes claimed in migration studies (see Chapter 3 on NELM). First, cross-border migration does
not always contribute to reducing risks and securing basic protection needs. Second, existing social
protection systems may be disrupted (Devereux, Roelen, and Ulrichs 2015). In order to further detail
the mechanisms at work, the next chapter focuses on the reproduction of inequalities on the family and
friendship scale.
6

Social Protection among Small Groups in European

Transnational Social Spaces

While it would be a shortcut to call cross-border migration as such a strategy of social protection, it
is a strategy to increase opportunities, for which social protection is a main ingredient. Abundant
research attests to the fact that social protection occurs not only within the boundaries of national
states of immigration and emigration but also across their borders (e.g. Avato, Koettl, and Sabates-
Wheeler 2010). Migration is of particular relevance because it links disparate and fragmented social
spaces of unequal life chances and social protection. Only about one-fourth of the world’s population
has access to some form of comprehensive social protection (i.e. protection provided by schemes run
by states, markets, and civil society organizations), usually in combination with protection provided
by small groups. Also, many migrants, undocumented as well as documented, do not enjoy full social
rights and thus state- and/or civil society-provided social protection in the country of destination,
origin, or transit (e.g. Carmel, Cerami, and Papadopoulos 2011). This state of affairs raises the
question of how migrants and their families actually organize social protection. This chapter
examines some examples, including families and kinship networks (sometimes also called informal
social protection because it is not delivered by formal organizations), and the consequences for
patterns of social inequalities.
In particular, we need to understand the mechanism operative on the level of households, families,
and friendship circles. How are social inequalities (re)produced in the provision of social protection
among migrants and their (non-mobile) family members? The major empirical proposition is that
migration and certain forms of cross-border social protection constitute an adaptive response to
social risks and threats in the social spaces implicated in migration, but at the same time perpetuate
old inequalities and create new ones.
Here, the transnational perspective shifts from a world scale (Chapter 4) and a supranational and
national one (Chapter 5) to one that privileges cross-border ties of migrants within small groups such
as families in transnational social spaces. The view applied here takes as its focus structures and
practices of small groups in the context of cross-border transactions of groups, persons,
organizations, states, and supranational constellations. It thus complements the analysis undertaken on
the other scales in previous chapters. This approach considers not only social protection provided by
states and other authorities but it also introduces social protection produced and delivered in
families, households, and (fictive) kinship networks—in short, any kind of social entity transcending
the borders of national states. It is appropriate for international migration and social protection
because cross-border transactions may take place on different scales. It is by the very practices
themselves that agents constitute social protection on various scales in the first place, and that they
are constituted by the structures, that is, concatenated connections and circulations, in which they are
engaged (cf. Giddens 1984). Looking at transnational aspects of social protection entails an analysis
of exchanges at the local, national, cross-border, or even global scales—not limited to but also
including the immigration state and portability of rights. Migrants are thus players in multiple systems
of protection in two ways: first, they may at times draw on provisions of social protection in both the
immigration and the emigration states as ‘players in two systems’ (Razum, Sahin-Hodoglugil, and
Polit 2005), and, second, they are likely to draw on public and kinship sources of social protection
(Faist et al. 2015).
The first part of this chapter sheds light on how social protection in small groups is entangled with
respect to the principles of social order and how it engages states, markets, and civil society. The
second part delves into the analysis of the role of transnationality, that is, the degree to which
migrants and their significant others exchange resources across national state borders for social
protection. The third part considers the implications of social security for the social position of
migrants and, in particular, the subjective perception of this position by the migrants themselves.

Social Protection in Small Groups

A multitude of studies exist on aspects of state-based social protection beyond borders in the realm of
migration, some of which have been discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. There are, however, fewer
insights into social protection provided by small groups such as families, not to mention the
combination of various sources of protection and their assemblages. In the relations between mostly
state-based and primarily family-based aspects, there are three alternatives: crowding out, crowding
in, and complementarity (Bilecen and Barglowski 2015).
Crowding out means that public forms of social protection replace the ones provided by small
groups. In other words, a strong welfare state or an advanced developmental state is assumed to offer
a variety of protection services and provisions, which leads to the decline of family contributions and
decreases their role. A prominent example is old-age care. In most European states, retirement
schemes have come to largely replace care of the elderly by relatives, children in particular, over the
past one hundred years, despite the fact that many elderly people live in relative poverty and have
lower living standards than during the time of their formal employment.
Crowding in refers to tendencies of publicly provided social protection in one realm to enable
more provision in other realms. This means that a well-established welfare state provides individuals
with the necessary resources and free time to get involved in protection tasks. Again, take pensions as
an example. If retirement benefits are sufficiently high, older people may not require financial help
from their children for hiring nurses or cleaning personnel, and may even subsidize children and other
family members to engage in activities such as higher education. Among migrants, relatives in
immigration countries may pay the tuition fees of relatives in the countries of origin, for example (see
Chapter 3).
Finally, complementarity indicates practices by which migrants combine resources from both
public and family-based social protection to make ends meet. This third perspective does not assume
that either the effects of substitution as crowding out or stimulation as crowding in are decisive, but
that public and kinship structures complement each other. Various forms of social protection such as
state transfers, social services, and family protection build on each other. One example would be
relatively poor migrants (or non-migrant citizens in immigration countries) who combine both social
assistance payments and irregular work to make ends meet (Jordan 1999). Social protection within
interpersonal networks is critical for migrants’ social security because it functions as an ‘insurance
mechanism’ with a ‘fall-back position’ (McAuslan and Sabates-Wheeler 2011: 71) where the public
schemes fail or do not exist.
Hence, the task here is to delve in more detail into the family realm of social protection which
brings to light the interdependence of migrants with their significant others in the countries of origin
and settlement. Such arrangements are usually grounded in norms and thus obligations of generalized
reciprocity, and they are central to improving life chances not least because of the manifold risks and
threats faced by migrants. Family-based forms of social protection are particularly important where
public social security does not exist, fails, or—as would be expected—does not cover all risks and
thus needs to be complemented (Baykara-Krumme 2008). Some migrants prefer family-based social
protection because they feel that it is culturally appropriate; for example, providing care to elderly
relatives. Social protection among migrants and their significant others is usually based on reciprocal
systems of exchange: when migrants need help to get started in the country of immigration, such as
obtaining papers to acquire legal status, they often rely on subsidies from home, called reverse
remittances (Chapter 3). Once established in destination countries, resources may flow in the other
direction once these migrants have settled into work and residence abroad. These often include
financial transfers among relatives, for example to help buy property or cover health expenses or for
a relative to study. In general, flows of financial remittances play an important role for household
incomes of migration regions (see, e.g. Chukanska and Comini 2012, for Eastern Europe). Social
protection in small social groups is based on rather strict forms of generalized reciprocity, with the
danger always looming that members of families and close circles withdraw from obligations
(Benda-Beckmann 2015).
The type of border mobility and embeddedness in countries of immigration, transit, and emigration
clearly play a role in how migrants are able to draw upon various sources of social protection in and
from various sites. Three general types of mobility–social protection relationships can be
distinguished. First, there is circular mobility, such as commuting and seasonal work. Those engaged
in this are deeply embedded in the country of origin with respect to family ties and/or state-provided
forms of social protection. They would draw less on social protection in the host country. Still, their
protection needs in the host country may be precarious, as with female care workers, for example,
who might not be able to secure adequate care for their own children left behind. Second, at the other
end of the continuum, there are migrants who are firmly settled in the country of immigration. For
them, cross-border ties may still be important in various ways. For instance, they may want to support
relatives abroad either through individual or collective remittances, or they may even need protective
support from relatives in the country of origin because of unemployment. Clearly, there is no fixed
relationship between settlement on the one hand and cross-border ties on the other. Third, there are
various categories in between the first two, such as those migrants who have no strong ties to or
settlement in the country of either origin or destination. They often draw heavily on protection with
respect to emotional and financial support from relatives and friends in the country of origin, for
example in the case of young men from Eastern Europe in Germany (Bilecen and Sienkiewicz 2015).
Inequalities: The Role of Transnationality
The transnational field of social protection overlaps with the social spaces of migration and is the
arena in which decisions are made and power exerted. The ties and positions in transnational spaces
and fields and migrants’ degree of transnationality must thereby be understood not as static
constellations, but as dynamic processes. Transactions in transnational social spaces allow for
potentially simultaneous membership in two or more spatially distinct groups, as, for example, in
families living apart in different states, or those holding dual citizenship in national states. Social
protection needs arise in the process of migration and settlement itself. An example is the provision
of childcare when children join the migrant(s) abroad. In these cases, cross-border aspects are also
involved, ranging from sending financial remittances to take care of the health and education needs of
family members back home to physical provision of care for elderly or sick relatives on site in the
country of immigration or emigration (see, e.g. Sabates-Wheeler and Feldman 2011; Kilkey and
Merla 2014).
Since a consideration of transnational social protection includes the strategies of individual and
collective social actors, their degree of cross-border interaction—transnationality—matters.
Transnationality is a marker of heterogeneity, akin to other heterogeneities, such as age, gender,
citizenship, sexual orientation, cultural preferences, and language use. As to the advantages of
transnationality for migrants, it has been shown in the German case for the early 2000s that those
migrants with larger endowments of economic and cultural capital are also more likely to be engaged
in cross-border transactions, such as remitting money or staying abroad for longer periods of time
(Mau 2010). For non-migrants, the correlation between socio-economic status on the one hand and
level of cross-border contacts on the other is similar. What is noteworthy is that while 80 per cent of
all migrants and their children have some sort of cross-border ties, it is also the case that 30 per cent
of all non-migrants also have such ties (Fauser et al. 2015), suggesting that transnationality is a
characteristic of both groups (Faist 2014b). In short, transnationality as a heterogeneity points to
differential life chances; and higher amounts of capital are often associated with greater degrees of
transnationality.
In order to answer the main question of how social inequalities are reproduced in the provision of
informal social protection among migrants and their (sometimes non-mobile) family members, four
sub-questions have to be addressed: (1) What are the repertoires of migrants’ social protection
strategies on the scale of small groups? (2) In what ways are migrants’ social protection strategies
related to national welfare state policies and supranational regulations? (3) How do heterogeneities
intersect with transnationality in the realm of social protection? (4) What are the underlying
inequality-generating social mechanisms at work?
A study to shed light on these questions was conducted between 2011 and 2014, with data
collected primarily in 2011 and 2012.1 Three transnational social spaces with characteristic kinds of
legal status for migrants provided the relevant categories of individuals: labour migrants and
refugees/asylum seekers in the German–Turkish space; commuters, seasonal workers, and thus EU
citizens in the German–Polish space; and re-settlers, that is, ethnic Germans in the German–Kazakh
space. The multi-sited research design used both qualitative and quantitative methods to unearth the
nexus of social protection and social inequalities. At the core were semi-structured interviews with
migrants, their significant others, and non-migrants. The basis was a matched sample with n = 30 for
each transnational social space. Based on these interviews an ego-centric social network analysis2 (n
= 300) was carried out which allowed for a quantitative survey. These methods helped above all to
portray systematically the repertoires of social protection on the scale of families (Q1). Document
analysis and expert interviews were the main research methods used to cover the interlinkage of
family-based social protection strategies and the welfare states in which they are embedded (Q2).
The next step aimed to uncover the categorizations involved in the production of inequalities (Q3).
The inquiry into social mechanisms explaining the unequal distribution of social protection (Q4) was
based on the material provided by the answers to the first two questions.
Transnationality is a key concept here. For measurement purposes, an interval categorization is
used, that is activities and competences of migrants and non-migrants along a continuum of cross-
border practices, ranging from high to low over the life course. Using an interval scale helps to avoid
the dichotomizing use of transnational vs. national and systematically map transnationality for diverse
groups who hold different legal statuses, such as asylum seekers or labour migrants. Transnationality
is seen as a heterogeneity or attribute of social actors. This moves the discussion beyond narrow
conceptualizations based on ethnicity or nationality and includes a variety of heterogeneities such as
gender, age, world view, class, legal status, transnationality, and so on. In order to capture the
continuum of transnational practices, a multidimensional transnationality index is used which consists
of seven indicators: (a) interpersonal cross-border contacts; (b) virtual cross-border communication;
(c) physical border crossing; (d) media use across borders; (e) language use; (f) dual citizenship; and
(g) membership in transnational organizations. As the empirical results suggest, there is more
homogeneity for migrants from Turkey in their level of transnationality while Polish migrants and
those from Kazakhstan are more heterogeneous in this respect. While Turkish migrants exhibit a
higher degree of transnationality on average, migrants from Poland and especially from Kazakhstan
can also be found more frequently than the former in lower categories (Amelina et al. 2012). There is
a variety and an unequal distribution of transnationality within different migrant groups from different
countries of origin.
Transnationally oriented forms of social protection are expressed in specific social mechanisms
such as social control through the temporary assignment of care—for example, when children born in
their parents’ employment country are returned to the parents’ origin country and placed in the care of
relatives for long periods, perhaps to attend school. Such practices perpetuate inequality inasmuch as
they restrict children’s autonomy and, hence, their potential for development. Of the aforementioned
transnational social spaces this can be observed especially in the German–Turkish social space.
Migrants from both Turkey and Poland have a higher level of transnationality compared to those from
Kazakhstan. The mean of the migrants from Turkey is even higher than that of migrants from Poland.
The most heterogeneous group are migrants from Kazakhstan. They have the highest spread and among
them is a group that has but minimal connection to their country of origin, apart from occasional
consumption of Russian media or speaking the Russian language (Bilecen and Sienkiewicz 2015).
The latter case is explained by the fact that they emigrated as whole families and kinship groups.
Social protection can be operationalized in three ways—as information exchange, as care
relations, and as financial protection (Table 6.1). Overall, as the Turkish case suggests, the higher the
level of transnationality, the higher the levels of information received, and to some extent financial
resources. However, it has no effect on care relations (Bilecen and Cardona 2018).
Table 6.1. Operationalization of family-based social protection

Information Information on the labour market and assistance in finding employment

exchange Information on health care (doctors, medicine, insurance)
Information on legal status (visa, residence, work permits, naturalization process)
Information on legal issues
Information on education
Care relations Assistance with household chores (doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, reconstructing, redecorating)
Assistance with moving house
Providing care in cases of minor illnesses (flu)
Providing care in cases of severe illnesses (chronic diseases, disabilities, confinement to bed for several
months)
Elderly care
Regular childcare
Occasional childcare
Care in emergency situations
Financial protection Regular transfers of large amounts of money (over €500)
Regular transfers of smaller amounts of money (less than €500)
Occasional transfers of large amounts of money (over €500)
Occasional transfers of smaller amounts of money (less than €500)

Q1 concerns migrants’ social protection strategies on the small-group level. Information was
obtained through interviews with migrants in Germany and with their significant others and non-
migrants in the three countries of emigration. Social network analysis complemented the interview
data. The two most significant results are the following (Bilecen and Sienkiewicz 2015: 234): first,
care figured as the most important strategy of social protection in all cases, without exception.
Second, socializing was strongly associated with the provision of social protection, albeit with
respect to different reference groups: in their social networks, Turkish migrants have most contacts
with others across borders; migrants from Kazakhstan have contacts almost exclusively in Germany;
and EU-migrants from Poland show mixed patterns.
In detail, it becomes obvious that migrants from Turkey exchange a relatively high amount of
remittances, mostly from Turkey to Germany (Bilecen and Cardona 2018). This is a case of reverse
remittances. The bulk of the information exchange concerns health and retirement issues. Migrants and
their sometimes immobile families thus engage in stitching together actual and potential transnational
life in both Turkey and Germany. In contrast, migrants from Poland exchange financial resources to a
lesser extent although there is a flow in both directions. This latter case shows the relatively highest
exchange of care within and across borders, certainly enhanced by the contiguous national borders
between Poland and Germany and the resulting relative physical proximity. A common type of elder
care and remittances takes the form of migrants leasing their apartments in Poland and transferring the
benefits that accrue to the elderly. Migrants from Kazakhstan exchange social protection
predominantly within Germany. They define state-provided protection as an important factor for
improving their opportunities. Across borders they predominantly exchange emotional help, some
financial remittances, care of graves, and parcels of food.
Q2 concerns the relation between social protection strategies of migrants and national migration
and welfare regimes. Based on document analysis on welfare state regimes, migration histories, and
expert interviews, one of the primary results is that the interrelationship between family-based social
protection and state-based social protection is not a uni-directional causal one. For example, a high
level of publicly provided social protection does not necessarily weaken family-based social
protection. In this case there is no crowding-out effect to be observed. The choice of the source of
social protection is instead contingent upon negotiations within and across borders. For instance,
whether or not patients released from hospital are cared for by family members or professional
services is sometimes the subject of intense bargaining within families of Polish migrants in Germany
(Barglowski, Krzyżowski, and Świątek 2015).
Q3 addresses the relevant categories for the production of inequalities intersecting with
transnationality. The results are based on participant observation in Germany and in the three
emigration countries. It turns out that legal status is important for inequalities not only with respect to
public forms of social protection but also within social protection provided in small groups. For
example, legal status enables access to the labour market, stable employment relations, and a secure
income. In turn, these are prerequisites for sustained financial help to relatives within and across
borders, but they also offer a better foundation for exchanging information on care. In this case, we
can speak of a crowding-in effect. With respect to the Turkish case, there is a clear gender effect in
the provision of support. Women are more supportive not only towards women but also to men.
As shown above, transnationality is indeed a significant heterogeneity in social protection. With
regard to cross-border social protection strategies, the degree of transnationality is therefore relevant.
If a high degree of transnationality obtains (i.e. if there is a high density of cross-border contacts,
membership in country of origin associations, and visits abroad and even multiple nationalities), there
is a high probability that social protection within families and friendship cliques is organized across
borders. When there is a low degree of transnationality, local networks in the country of destination
play a stronger role. With respect to information flows, high-intensity transnational brokers benefit the
most compared to those who do not have access to cross-border networks or show high levels of
transnational engagement. A combination of brokerage and cohesion may result in higher financial
resources but brokerage alone does not appear to positively impact care (Bilecen and Cardona 2018).
Thus, a trade-off between brokerage and cohesion or closure seems to correspond to a trade-off
between information flows on the one hand and financial resources and care on the other.
The degree of transnationality also has an impact on inequalities. One important aspect in the
provision of the three realms of social protection is the intersection of transnationality, gender, age,
and network size. The following results on the three forms of social protection exchanged in small
groups apply to all three transnational social spaces, albeit with some regional differences (Bilecen
and Sienkiewicz 2015). Gender-specific differences accompany transnationality in the provision of
information, care, and financial protection. It is more likely that the female members of families
provide social protection. With respect to information, the ego (network subject) has the highest
probability of receiving information when (s)he is young, highly transnational, and part of a small
network. The ego most likely to provide information, again, is highly transnational but also female,
young, and highly educated. As to care received, the ego has the highest probability of receiving care
when the ego is highly transnational and young, the alter is female, old, and a family member, and the
network small and dense. With respect to providing care, gender relations are reversed: ego is female
and alter is male. The ego has the highest probability of providing financial protection when the ego
is highly transnational and female, the alter is a family member, and the network is small. Again, with
respect to receiving financial protection, the gender roles are reversed.
Q4 relates to the mechanisms (re)producing inequalities. Reciprocity and social comparisons turn
out to be the most important mechanisms, complemented by others such as inclusion/exclusion,
hierarchization, and opportunity hoarding. Reciprocity can be conceptualized as a master mechanism
which serves a heuristic function, namely to comprehend the activities of agents, the strategies
involved, and the meaning given by social actors to such activities. Generalized reciprocity refers to
the non-market exchange of goods and services, or where a return is eventually expected, even if
delayed. It is thus distinct from a true gift, where no return is envisaged (e.g. Becker 1986). Smaller
units such as families are often characterized by these aspects of generalized reciprocity. It is
important to remember that flows of financial help not only move from an immigration to an
emigration context but also from the latter to the former (Boccagni 2015).
On a macro-institutional level, specific reciprocity is most likely to occur in public social security
schemes. A case in point is the so-called generational contract upon which post-Second World War
retirement schemes were built in the German welfare state: one generation pays into the coffers of the
pension scheme helping the retirees to enjoy the fruits of their labour. Later on, the dues-paying
employees expect that the following young generation will do the same for them.
Importantly, the notion of generalized reciprocity is helpful in conceptualizing social relations on a
small scale. What we find in the studies of all three transnational social spaces is that with respect to
social protection generalized reciprocity is observed within interpersonal networks: the way in
which a service or good is reciprocated is more vague and open time-wise although an obligation to
do so exists. What both specific and generalized reciprocity have in common with respect to social
security is that they are usually not balanced or symmetrical, that is, there is no immediate direct
exchange of equivalents. As a matter of fact, there is a wide variation with respect to the services
reciprocated and the timescale in which this occurs. Also, the perception of privilege matters. For
instance, relatives who stayed in Kazakhstan, Poland, or Turkey usually perceived migrant family
members in Germany as economically powerful and not in need of support by members of kinship
groups. The asymmetries between the global South and the global North are thus reflected on the
family scale as well.
Reciprocal relations are characterized by asymmetrical power relations, which point to other
mechanisms to be discussed in more detail: exclusion, hierarchization, and opportunity hoarding (first
mentioned in Chapter 5). Power relations have to be specified in order to detail these mechanisms. In
principle, there are ‘three faces of power’ (Lukes 1974): first, the power of decision-making and thus
power to determine issues; second, the power of non-decision-making, and thus agenda-setting; and
third, the power of ideology, shaping people’s perceptions, which equates to manipulation.
With respect to inclusion in and exclusion from entities of social protection, membership in groups
and participation in networks are important because among other things these provide and facilitate
access to jobs, accommodation, and childcare (Chapter 5). For migrants working in the service
sector, clique and group membership is crucial not only in the search for work, but also for making
childcare arrangements, to ensure care of children while parents are abroad, or care of older
relatives who have been left at home. The study of the Polish–German social space suggests that the
care of children is a prime example of the use of transnational resources. This not only concerns the
actual care in situ and in person but also larger issues of child-rearing, such as the transmission of the
country-of-origin language to children of migrants (Barglowski, Krzyżowski, and Świątek 2015).
Obviously, issues of power come in to play where decisions on the rearing of children are concerned.
Here, a more fine-grained mechanism needs to be introduced: the reduction of ambivalence. By
promoting their children’s learning of the country-of-origin language, parents may be able to reduce
the ambivalent feelings they may have in choosing between adaptation to the context of settlement on
the one hand and maintaining transnational ties on the other. Language is an element which produces
simultaneity of being here and there with respect to countries and intergenerational continuity.
At the national societal level, immigration policy measures and citizenship are decisive with
respect to membership. Very simply, those migrants holding full German citizenship also have full
access to social rights and services. The differentiation relates to those migrants who are non-
citizens. With respect to legal status, re-settlers from Kazakhstan were the most privileged since they
received full German citizenship upon arrival (Sienkiewicz, Sadovskaya, and Amelina 2015). At the
EU level, legal affiliation to a state and, hence, full membership in the sense of equal rights for state
citizens (e.g. social rights) and Union citizens (e.g. freedom to travel and right of establishment in EU
member states) are important because they facilitate cross-border travel and thus ensure a higher
degree of transnationality in terms of cross-border mobility. In our cases, this arrangement applies to
persons holding Polish citizenship—Poland acceded to the EU in 2004 but free mobility of labour for
citizens in this wave of accession was effected only in 2014 in Germany. Citizenship of an EU
member country, and consequently freedom to travel, thus changed the situation considerably for the
mobility of Polish citizens. Those migrants hailing from Turkey have faced a more difficult situation.
Despite the more than five-decades-old accession treaty to the EU, Turkish citizens are not free to
take up residence but depend on a secure labour market status. In terms of inequality, this means that
migrants from Kazahkhstan, Poland, and Turkey, taking into account their specific legal status, by and
large have different options relating to freedom of travel or access to social services. In sum, legal
status based on territoriality has an effect on inequalities with respect to transnationality, but also in
terms of resources such as time that could be spent looking after one’s own family members instead of
standing in long queues outside consulates.
The provision of social protection within families and wider kinship groups involves steady
hierarchization in the sense that categories of persons emerge with higher and lower degrees and
kinds of privileges (Dreby and Adkins 2010). There are thus struggles around obligations, for
example across generations. When grandmothers are asked to take care of their grandchildren, as
described in the German–Polish case study, there are sometimes processes of negotiation and also
conflicts with respect to the fulfilment of obligations which can be expected from parents and/or
grandmothers (Barglowski, Krzyżowski, and Świątek 2015). In these cases, power relations manifest
not only in the first dimension, decision-making, but also in the second, namely agenda-setting: it is
the formation of expectations and the struggles around them that matter. Such conflicts around
obligations and expectations in reciprocal kinship relations differ from those in other relationships,
especially those that are marketized. For example, when an ‘ethnic nanny’ is hired to take care of
children or the elderly, the power asymmetries between the parties involved are usually rather clear.
The very social fact of a gendered division of labour concerns the third dimension of power,
ideology, going far beyond family relations and reflecting societal manipulation.
The manifold hierarchizations within families are embedded in broader differentiations of legal
status among migrants. Obviously, access to state-provided social protection is more comprehensive
for those migrants, ceteris paribus, who have a more secure residence and working status.
Sometimes, however, such aspects of hierarchization are reflected within one and the same family, as,
for example, among a Kazakh family in which the husband is a German citizen (re-settler) and his
wife holds temporary residence status (Sienkiewicz, Sadovskaya, and Amelina 2015).
Social closure in the sense of privilege as a means to increase one’s own opportunities—
opportunity hoarding—is occasionally used by certain (ethnic, religious, kinship) groups to occupy
specific niches (Tilly 2005: 153–70). A case in point is the ‘Golden Day’ gatherings of Turkish
migrant women in Germany (Bilecen 2015; cf. Thieme 2003). During their meetings each of the
women contributes a fixed sum of money which is subsequently given to one of the attendees—a new
recipient is chosen at each meeting. These gatherings thus function very much like rotating credit
associations. In this case the preferential inclusion of a certain group of women (an instance of an
opportunity-hoarding mechanism) ensures that the members of the respective group, for instance
friends from the same home town, benefit from this allocation principle. This is a form of protection
in that these women improve their life chances in combining and cohering; the safest way of doing so
is with persons from the same home country or even region (hemşeri). There are some indications
that material opportunity hoarding also occurs through religious communities (see also Yeung 2006).
At the same time, such arrangements give rise to inequality through categorizations insofar as access
to such social networks is selective. In the Kazakh–German space, opportunity hoarding is more
strictly confined to families themselves. For example, family members provide mutual support in the
construction of houses (an instance of old age provision) through interest-free loans (Sienkiewicz,
Sadovskaya, and Amelina 2015).
With regard to cross-border social protection strategies, there is a noteworthy variation in the
provision of social protection through family and friends in the three cases studied. All three
categories of mobiles are confronted with, in principle, the same kind of welfare state arrangements
in Germany. Nonetheless, there are certain specific characteristics in each of the three transnational
social spaces which speak to distinct patterns of assembling social protection from various sources.
The German–Turkish social space is on the whole characterized by social activities in the form of
meetings and gatherings, activities that play a crucial role in the delivery of social protection. In this
case, irrespective of legal status, family and community support networks and the information
exchanged in these respective gatherings form the backbone of kinship- and friendship-based social
protection. As in all other cases, it complements state- and organization-provided social protection.
In the German–Polish space social activities are mostly restricted to family circles, that is, family
practices supplementing state schemes. In the German–Kazakh case, public social security determines
family-based social protection practices even more than in the German–Polish and German–Turkish
cases. Most social protection is symbolic. Also, it is less transnational as whole families and kinship
groups emigrate, so that only a few links to the country of origin remain.
These findings point to the variations in the way family-based and state-based social security is
assembled. For example, migrants from Kazakhstan report that they use various sources quite flexibly
and simultaneously according to specific requirements. In the self-perception of many Polish
migrants, kinship-based social protection, especially in the realm of care, is located primarily within
family networks and considered to be more valuable than state-provided care. This also seems to
apply to Turkish migrants. Care, in particular, points to the third face of power, ideology, insofar as
societal conceptions of gendered work heavily influence which person(s) within families take
primary responsibility for care relations.

The Meaning of Heterogeneities and Inequalities

The analysis of social protection opens up questions about the implications of cross-border practices
which favour a simultaneous positioning of persons in different systems of stratification in
immigration, emigration, and transit countries. It stands to reason that different systems of
stratification and notions of inequality may become relevant for the social (self-)positioning of
migrants. Therefore, an analysis of the perception of social positions is crucial. From an empirical
point of view, the criteria for the assessment of inequalities are usually oriented to norms that are
relative or relational and allow comparisons with categories of people who are, in social terms, not
too far removed from each other (cf. Panning 1983).
To start with, migrants and their significant others in the three transnational spaces analysed in the
previous section may have various points of reference when it comes to evaluating their social
position and thus also perceiving social inequalities. A transnational approach is confronted, of
course, with problems of measurability and political communication regarding inequalities, as data
collection and political discourse are primarily confined within the territorial borders of national
states. The interesting question is which norms and what categories of people are considered relevant
by the participating actors in which socio-spatial context. The perception of inequalities in terms of
resources, status, and power can relate to the emigration side, the immigration side, to onward
destinations, or to all three—or even to global norms, oriented to (social) human rights (see also
Chapter 4). In a transnational perspective, inequalities must be regarded as potentially borderless: the
social life worlds of individuals and, where applicable, their respective criteria for comparison,
extend beyond state borders. As the case studies suggest, there is evidence, for example, that people
from Poland, Turkey, and Kazakhstan who live and work in Germany experience upward social
mobility in terms of state-provided social protection, income, and career chances compared to their
situation in their region of origin, but when measured against the standards of the destination countries
they rank much further down the social scale, because, among other reasons, their educational and
occupational qualifications from home are not fully recognized (on Europe more generally, see Favell
and Recchi 2011: 74).
There is initial evidence from the foregoing analysis that a mechanism we could call comparative
social positioning is at work. The spaces of comparison involved are above all constituted by
straightforward evaluations of situations in the immigration and emigration regions, and, in principle,
other countries in which the migrants have lived. The overall social-psychological mechanism at
work seems to be relative (dis)advantage. In the case of migrants from Turkey, they and their
significant others in the countries of emigration perceive Germany as a strong and effective welfare
state. Family members and friends in Turkey think the migrants in Germany enjoy better rights and
welfare benefits than they themselves do in Turkey, where they perceive themselves to be confined
mainly to family-based social protection. In particular they refer to public education, unemployment,
and health benefits. For example, the brother of one interviewee in Germany was hospitalized in
Turkey and while he was sick, he said, all of his brothers sent money to him, while female members
of the family supported him emotionally but also took care of daily routines such as cooking, checking
his medicine, and so on (Bilecen, Çatır, and Orhon 2015). In short, migrants and their family members
and friends interviewed in Germany and Turkey tend to perceive the German state as superior to the
Turkish one in terms of social protection and constantly compare the two. This perception has
implications for migrants living on the immigration end of the social space. Overall, they are
perceived as doing much better than their significant others; and those remaining in the emigration
countries tend to resent this social fact.
The significance of comparison can be particularly well observed with respect to perceptions of
relative (dis)advantage, also visible in the Polish–German transnational space. It is tied to the belief
that making a living in Germany is easy, and that Germany is a comparatively stronger welfare state.
For centuries, migration from Poland to the ‘West’—and mainly to Germany—has been a common
livelihood strategy. However, the gap in material resources available to individuals has decreased in
the German–Polish space over recent decades. Nonetheless, although Poland is a comparatively
wealthy country, people still migrate from Poland to make a ‘living in the West’, yet their migration
patterns, reasons, and destinations are diversified. Polish migrants in Germany and their (non-
migrant) relatives in Poland both share expectations of a successful migration project in Germany,
which means sufficient economic foundations and more individualized life-scripts by being freed
from family obligations by the relatively more encompassing German welfare state (Barglowski,
Krzyżowski, and Świątek 2015).
In the case of the Kazakh re-settlers in Germany and their significant others in the country of origin
we observe an on-going comparison of life chances in Germany and Kazakhstan in terms of access to
social protection for pensioners, health care, stability and predictability of social protection, the
educational system, and life chances for children—as in the two previous cases. The comparison of
socio-economic opportunities is a very important topic in the Kazakh–German transnational social
space because for many re-settlers the main reason to migrate is the opportunity to get full access and
entitlements to state-provided social protection in Germany, which is perceived from both sides as
the best way of protection against social risks. The access to satisfactory state-provided protection
produces a new perception of life chances, which has an influence on the way they organize their
family-based protection. The perceptions then focus on areas which are sometimes not sufficiently
covered by publicly provided social security, such as old age care. The inclusion of migrants into
German formal protection is also patterned by the mechanism of relative (dis)advantage, particularly
in the eyes of non-migrant family members in Kazakhstan, who expect informal protection from
migrant family members even though some of them have special needs themselves, such as suffering
from a chronic serious illness (Sienkiewicz, Sadovskaya, and Amelina 2015).
In sum, the evidence suggests that migrants and their significant others do not necessarily engage in
systematic comparisons of living conditions, socio-economic opportunities, and social protection
measures across countries. Instead, migrants and their dependents use—alternatingly—the different
welfare states and protection schemes as foils upon which they project issues they have to tackle in
order to address the various risks associated with employment, child-rearing, and care of the elderly.
In this way, the meta-norm ‘equality’ as a central prerequisite for evaluating opportunities and social
inequalities is not applied abstractly by migrants and their dependents but finds entry through
comparisons of appropriate social security domains in relevant countries and/or aspects of social
protection.

Outlook: Cross-Border Life and Comparisons

As suggested in the foregoing analysis, the subjective significance and attribution of social
inequalities is worth examining in detail because the transnationalized social question is conceivable
only against the background of social inequalities that are deemed to be normatively unjustifiable.
From an empirical point of view, the criteria for the assessment of inequalities is usually oriented to
norms that are relative or relational and allow comparisons with categories of people who are, in
social terms, not too far removed from each other. Also, sometimes comparisons of selected elements
of social security systems, such as health care or old age pensions, become relevant. The interesting
question is what categories of people and which norms are considered relevant by the participating
actors in the respective labour and social protection organizations and political arenas. In a
transnational perspective, inequalities can be regarded as borderless: while state borders, and
especially the boundaries of official membership and affiliation, are constitutive of a person’s
opportunities in life, these boundaries are not necessarily congruent with the daily realities of cross-
border workers.
 Transnational social spaces covering the EU and their borderlands and peripheries are
particularly interesting cases, because it is not only the poorer nation states that can serve as a point
of reference for the subjective assessment of inequalities, but also the richer welfare states—both for
people from the relatively poorer regions of the EU and for those from regions outside the EU. The
social life worlds of individuals and, where applicable, their respective criteria for comparison
extend beyond state borders.

Notes
1. The project ‘Transnationality, the Distribution of Social Protection and Inequalities’ (2011–14) was part of the Collaborative Research
Centre 882 on ‘Heterogeneities and Inequalities’, funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft,
DFG), https://sfb882.uni-bielefeld.de/en/projects/c3.html.
2. Egocentric social network analysis is a methodological tool used to understand the structure, function, and composition of network
ties around an individual (Scott 2006).
Part III
The Transnational Puzzle: Politics around the Social
Question

Part II of this book explored how cross-border migration can be interpreted as set within the patterns
of social inequalities between the global South and the global North, and how migrants and other
actors have responded to the risks associated with such inequalities by means of various sources of
social protection on different scales from state to family. In particular, the social mechanisms of
inequality (re)production have been specified. We turn now to examine how inequalities have become
topics in public debates in welfare states of the global North and development states of the global
South, and how social inequalities have been reproduced in the politics of immigration and
emigration regions as a transnationalized social question. In this third part of the book, Chapter 7
develops a framework in which processes of inequality (re)production in politics can be understood
in a cross-border perspective. Whenever appropriate, EU states and surrounding regions are included
to cast as wide a net as possible. Chapters 8 and 9 deal with politico-economic and politico-cultural
dimensions of cross-border mobilities with a focus on migration to Germany and from various
emigration countries, respectively—always set within a perspective which departs from the
transnational puzzle: the observation that the politics around cross-border phenomena is mostly dealt
with in nationally bound political spheres.
7

Externalization in Cross-Border Migration

There is a veritable transnational puzzle in cross-border migration. Cross-border transactions among

categories such as migrants, both mobile and non-mobile, constitute a significant part of overall ties
and social practices around the world. The emergence of institutionalized spaces of social protection
(Chapter 4) and transnational social spaces (Chapters 5 and 6) is a case in point. Yet public resources
and institutions concerning social protection, such as redistribution and institutional regulation
intended to address the implications of heterogeneities as well as intense debates on social
inequalities, are set mainly within the confines of national public spheres. In short, while there are
incipient transnational public spheres in supranational structures such as the EU, the main political
theatre is the national public sphere (Peters et al. 2005), embedded in the global regimes of social
protection and cross-border mobility. The consequences of cross-border migration can thus be looked
at as a transnationalized social question.
The question pursued in this chapter is: given the absence of a multilateral global migration
regime, how do the bi- and multilateral relations between states and the general cross-border
networks of political, economic, and cultural interactions shape the unequal and power-asymmetric
governance of migration? Over the past decades, the most visible artefact of this regime has been the
proliferation of walls and fences. In general, this has been a long-term development in Europe dating
back at least to the First World War. The latter can be seen as a watershed, with open borders being
replaced by ever more sophisticated forms of control. Quite tellingly, in his recollections of the pre-
First World War European world, novelist Stefan Zweig described the closure of national borders as
a loss of a cosmopolitan spirit which characterized an important part of the European intellectual
milieu (2013 [1942]). More recently, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ironically, a new surge of
walling and fencing has set in with increasing ferocity. In 1990, only fifteen national states had walls
or fences along their borders; by 2016, the number had grown to nearly seventy. These fortifications
have come at a price. According to the IOM, 40,000 people died attempting to cross a border
between 2005 and 2014.1 And this example refers only to the most obvious forms of restrictionist
policies directed against unwanted cross-border mobility. This situation has to be seen against a
backdrop of global armed conflicts that have led to a significant increase in forced migration towards
European countries, a rise of more than 200 per cent over the past decade (Eurostat 2016c).
The main argument here is that the migration politics and policies of fortification and restriction
have resulted in an externalization of the costs of migration, including the social–psychological costs
of coping with blocked mobilities, an imposition of a legal–institutional framework of migration
control upon the countries bordering the EU in Eastern Europe and North Africa, and a shift in the
economic costs of restricted mobilities to the locations of origin. Externalization here refers to
extraterritorial state actions to prevent mobile persons and groups from entering the legal
jurisdictions of states. Even more, the goal is to make these migrants, including asylum seekers,
legally inadmissible without individually considering the merits of their protection claims. Such
efforts may include state actors on the national and supranational level but may also affect those from
businesses, such as airlines, or civil society bodies, such as (I)NGOs administering programmes on
behalf of states. Such measures encompass direct intervention in border control as well as more
indirect actions, such as the cooperation with countries of transit and origin in migration control
practices (Frelick, Kysel, and Podkul 2016: 193).
The externalization of border and migration control, from the borders of national states and the
external borders of the EU, fulfils a crucial function: remote control through actors such as states
adjacent to the EU and countries of origin, especially in North and West Africa and the Middle East,
aims to exclude a contentious issue from political debates around migration in European immigration
countries. If migrants do not reach the immigration countries and/or if migrants can be expelled, the
state does not need to deal with this unwanted and unwelcome migrant ‘surplus’ population. States are
then able to at least partly circumvent the liberal and the welfare paradox.
In addition, politics around migration and development has been an element of externalization.
Migrants are held responsible for developing their countries of origin and the latter receive
development aid in exchange for increased control of emigration and transit migration. Given the
hugely asymmetric power distribution between emigration and immigration countries, the latter have
been able to transfer a great deal of the costs of migration to migrants and to transit and emigration
countries. This is so with respect to the economic costs and benefits of migration to emigration and
immigration countries, and also in regard to the welfare of individual migrants. For example,
unwelcome asylum seekers are blocked, often even before they reach the territory of European states
to claim asylum. The costs are thus born by the migrants, their significant others, and transit countries
bordering the EU. Externalization also breeds concomitant internalization: those who have entered
immigration states in Europe, those found not deserving of protection, are sometimes extradited and
sent back to countries of origin, though this practice has been somewhat checked by the non-
refoulement rule (Menjivar 2014).
The structure of this chapter is as follows. The first section discusses implications of the absence
of a global regime for migration. Although there is no explicit global governance regime (see Chapter
4), there are elements of governance in cross-border migration, such as international norms
constituting a world polity as a moral polity which set basic norms regulating openings and closures
for cross-border migrants, the most basic of which are the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
ILO conventions, and the UNHCR 1951 Refugee Convention. In addition, the rudiments of a global
regime also contain national state and supranational policies. One such element of a governance order
is the externalization of the costs of migration control—economic and social–psychological—and the
transposition of legal–institutional frameworks from the global North to the global South. The second,
third, and fourth sections describe various types of externalization, respectively social–
psychological, politico–legal, and economic. One crucial part of politico–legal and economic
externalization is the linkage of migration control by sending and transit countries to development aid.
The discussion delves in the fifth section into the migration and development nexus in its various
historical periods and its transmutations over time, complemented by a consideration of a third
element: securitization of migration control. The chapter concludes with a discussion of
internationalization of migration control as a complement to externalization.

World Polity as a Moral Polity

While we do not find a global regime for migration and other forms of mobility, as, for example, in
the realm of trade (e.g. WTO), it is still useful to take a comprehensive view of global
interdependence and diffusion of norms, in this case those norms relating to human rights of migrants
and refugees. While these norms do not exclusively govern how states control migrants, they do play
a role in the governance of migration, particularly so in the case of those states designated as liberal
democracies. State behaviours in the observance and implementation of human rights are ambiguous.
On the one hand, sovereign states are the prime actors who construct human rights norms on the
international level and put them into the form of conventions. On the other hand, states have a great
deal of discretion in implementing the norms by either circumventing or ignoring them. It seems that
the failure of human rights governance and thus moral global polity is inevitable.
Still, there are countervailing tendencies. The most important ones are the international
organizations themselves created by states, such as the United Nations. UN organizations such as
UNHCR act as a voice for refugees; to a much lesser extent this can also be said of the IOM in the
case of labour migration, the IOM being an intergovernmental organization. Moreover, there are
multiple human rights NGOs which serve as collective norm entrepreneurs and constantly publicize
human rights abuses. Mechanisms such as the ‘boomerang effect’, for example, help to ensure that
criticism not heeded by states violating human rights is directed to liberal governments—which, at
times, help to table these issues (Keck and Sikkink 1998). In other words, states that initially resist
internal and international pressures risk greater future pressure, as domestic NGO activists enter into
cross-border alliances. While the boomerang effect is of limited reach in the field of migration, its
impact is not entirely absent.
One helpful concept to approaching migration control from a global point of view is that of world
polity (Meyer et al. 1997), which refers to the idea that the national state has steadily expanded as a
global organization since the nineteenth century and that certain ideas and norms about how to
organize public life spread along with this process; for example, ways to tax the population, control
the territory, educate the young, and—crucial in our context—ways to distinguish mobility as short-
term and welcome movement from migration as longer-term movement applying to certain categories
of individuals and groups, and the very rules regulating movements based on such distinctions
(chapter 4). World polity ‘is constituted by distinct culture—a set of fundamental principles and
models, mainly ontological and cognitive in character, defining the nature and purposes of social
actors and action’ (Boli and Thomas 1997). This concept helps us to see how the transnational puzzle
around cultural norms and economic development has been discussed over past decades and how
externalization of costs and politico-institutional regulation has worked in the context of cross-border
migration. The world polity concept is useful because it directs our attention to the observation that,
formally, certain norms, such as basic human rights expressed in international conventions, have
entered the migration regulations of immigration states. Externalization of migration control, however,
serves to circumvent or avoid the implications of norms such as non-discrimination of refugees. The
function is to externalize debates and costs from the respective national realm. Externalization, as
discussed earlier, here refers to the transfer of migration control, nowadays sometimes called
migration management, to third countries through fencing and gate-keeping in exchange for
development aid. Fencing includes not only the building of physical walls but also a whole gamut of
technologies. A case in point is the EURODAC (European Dactyloscopy) fingerprinting system which
ensures that persons cannot claim asylum in more than one EU member state, as well as legal
regulations pertaining to admission to the territory and the granting of legal status. Gate-keeping is the
function which transit and origin countries fulfil as part of an overall scheme to reduce migration to
Europe but is also of benefit in the selection of those migrants who are indeed economically wanted
and sometimes even culturally welcome.
While national immigration policies vary between countries, the current and general trend is
towards the tightening of migration policies in almost all immigration countries in the OECD
(Entzinger 2012). In destination countries, securitization (the perception of migration and migrants as
a threat to welfare, cultural homogeneity, and physical security) has gained in importance, especially
after the 9/11 attacks. Securitization is institutionalized by bureaucratic decisions and practices that
create a sense of insecurity and unease. A ‘migration-security nexus’ has emerged (Faist 2004). As a
result, not only have existing institutional practices changed, but new institutions have emerged. The
EU border control agency, Frontex, was founded in 2004 to protect EU borders more efficiently from
irregular inflows of migrants, illustrating how migration can provoke the emergence of new
institutions. Institutional practices and the distribution of tasks have also changed within the EU.
Frontex, later reorganized as the European Border Surveillance System (Eurosur), was additionally
charged with an analysis regarding the expected numbers of undocumented crossings at different
borders of EU member states. The goal of this assessment was to inform EU policies and the process
of distributing funds for border protection to particular EU member states (Horii 2016). Yet the next
step, namely responsibility sharing among EU states, has not (yet) proceeded.
These developments are symptomatic of the post-Cold War global political order. The early 1990s
were still characterized by assumptions about the onward march of democracy and benign capitalism,
as anticipated by many a public intellectual. For example, Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’
referred to the end of ideological warfare (Fukuyama 1992). However, not only has ideology not
subsided but we live, materially speaking, in one of the most unequal periods of modernity since the
recording of income and wealth data was initiated in the early nineteenth century (Piketty 2014). The
relative material disparities between centre and periphery, global South and global North, have never
been higher, and the expectations for change of those in the majority of poorer countries are also high.
In this context, at least since the late 1970s, the meta-norm of human rights has been part of a key
political narrative to challenge not only gross material inequalities but also cultural misrecognition.
Appealing to human rights, in the case of refugees as well, has been a result of norms spreading in a
world moral polity. The world polity we live in can indeed be characterized as a moral polity, that is,
in a very broad sense a set of rules and norms which claim to be of global reach: it is steeped in the
ensemble of rights conventions based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the
1951 Geneva Refugee Convention.
When viewed in this perspective, this moral polity has been characterized by a tremendous
mismatch in migration control and humanitarian responses. The majority of the world’s refugees or
forced migrants are not housed by countries that have ratified the Geneva Convention or the 1967
New York Protocol, but those that have not.2 For example, the countries with the largest absolute
numbers of displaced persons are Pakistan and Iran (from Afghanistan) and Turkey; in terms of per
capita figures, it is Lebanon. Overall, close to 80 per cent to 90 per cent of refugees are housed by
countries in the global South (Eurostat 2017). By contrast, even countries that have taken in a
relatively high number of refugees by European standards, such as Germany, have rather restrictive
policies when it comes to defining which countries of origin are safe. On the supranational level, in
early 2016, the EU concluded an agreement with Turkey to deport refugees who make it to Greece—
and, in exchange, contribute to financing the costs for mostly Syrian refugees in Turkey, and to resettle
refugees from Turkey in the EU. It is a clear instance of externalization of control and costs.
According to human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, the human rights situation in
Turkey does not warrant the return of refugees from Greece to Turkey (see also Collett 2016).
Externalization of costs as an important element of the governance of migration has had significant
impact on forced migrants in particular, the largest group of migrants coming to Europe since the early
2010s. European countries that endorsed the 2005 UN commitment on R2P (responsibility to protect)
have since quickly and consistently externalized that responsibility (Borgia 2015). The reason is
obvious: once forced migrants reach the territories of liberal democracies, the likelihood of their
staying due to human rights norms is rather high, even in the case of non-recognition as asylum
seekers. An important reason can be found in the non-refoulement principle, the rule that asylum
seekers cannot be returned to countries where they face a threat to their life.
In principle, there are three basic types of externalization which characterize the policies and
politics of Europe as an ‘armed lifeboat’ (Parenti 2012: 235). First, there is socio-psychological
externalization. In a very basic Freudian sense, it is a sort of projection by shifting moral
responsibility. This is done by blaming certain categories of (forced) migrants for their own fate, as
evidenced by terms such as ‘economic refugees’ or ‘bogus asylum seekers’. Second, we can speak of
politico-legal externalization. This type consists of an external projection of EU rules to North
African, Middle Eastern, and East European countries in order to ensure migration control by
European standards and interests—often in exchange for development aid and resources for migration
control. Third, there is economic externalization. This means that the material costs of taking care of
refugees and migrants are shifted to transit and origin countries. This includes bearing the costs for
reintegration of deported migrants by countries of readmission and return.

Socio-Psychological Externalization

A crucial question to be considered is: given the assumption that the world polity is also a moral
polity, what are the main mechanisms fuelling the political perceptions around forced migration?
More specifically, and as used in this analysis, it refers to a polity in which most sovereign national
states have signed conventions on fundamental human rights, embodied in the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention—hence the world polity is also a moral polity. In other
words, in democracies, we would expect political contestation over what is morally right,
appropriate, and reasonable in a certain political sphere. When it comes to forced migration, world
polity points to the transactions between both destination countries in the global North and emigration
countries in the global South; it is from the latter that forced migrants take the exit option and depart in
search of protection elsewhere. The moral polity thus refers to expectations and the policies and
politics around the rights of and obligations between states and citizens—in this case the liberal
paradox, that is, the rights of forced migrants on the one hand, and the obligations of origin and
destination states on the other.
In order to understand the sharp resistance to refugee intake in most European states in recent
decades, we need to consider another tension which finds expression in the welfare paradox. In a
way, it underlies the liberal paradox. This welfare paradox points to the tension between social rights
of citizens in national welfare states which are opposed by the drive for liberalized trade and
exchange, and a deregulation of labour regulations. It is a tension inherent in the national state as a
welfare state and as a capitalist competition state. While the latter pushes for more open borders, the
former erects barriers: ‘…the relatively free movement of labor across national frontiers exposes the
tension between closed welfare states and open economies and that, ultimately, national welfare
states cannot coexist with the free movement of labor’ (G. Freeman 1986: 51). The welfare paradox
suggests that the consequences of different forms of transnationalization create tensions in and for
states which are hard to resolve. The protection of social rights for the citizens of immigration states
indicates that transnationality with respect to human mobility is seen in a negative way, while free
mobility of capital and goods is seen as positive. In short, states treat different forms of
transnationalization in quite different ways. The welfare paradox has sharpened in recent years:
deregulation of markets has led to increasing income inequalities also within the heartland of
capitalist states of the global North, although the overall rate of global poverty has fallen over the
past thirty years (Deaton 2004). Also, the delegitimization of selecting migrants by origin—for
example, along heterogeneities such as ethnicity and nationality—leads those immigration sceptics to
argue that they are concerned about pressure on the welfare state and jobs. Right-wing political
parties have taken up this issue and advocate thoroughly restrictive positions toward humanitarian
migration. Equally important, even mainstream political parties across Europe have at least in part
claimed that migration from Muslim countries into Europe constitutes a social problem (Odmalm
2014). All of this means that social rights tend to be politically re-nationalized to a certain extent.
Obviously, countries in the global North have not lived up to the idea of universal human rights.
Instead, law and policies have been employed to restrict the flow of forced migrants. Such an
approach sends a message to states throughout Europe to shed their responsibilities and further shift
the burden to the countries of origin and transit, and the migrants themselves. Forced migrants thus
have fewer and fewer options for protection and resettlement in European countries. In a nutshell, EU
policies therefore have set in motion a cascade of displacing responsibilities.
Clearly, restrictions on forced migrants and refugees are implemented contrary to all declarations.
Yet the expansive diffusion of the human rights narrative as a moral obligation has raised expectations
around the world overall and in emigration countries such as Turkey, Ukraine, Senegal, and Morocco,
for example (Hemmerechts et al. 2014). For many forced migrants, while the expectations of finding
refuge have increased due to human rights declarations and humanitarian proclamations, the actual
opportunities have not. This situation is likely to result in relative deprivation, that is, a widening
disparity between expectations for human rights to be honoured and stagnant or receding opportunities
for finding protection. The result is that their experience leads forced migrants to be profoundly
disappointed with the promises of receiving countries (Monsutti and Balci 2014). In this crucial
aspect, the current situation differs from the Cold War era between the late 1940s and the late 1980s.
During the Cold War the main narrative centred on freedom and democracy versus communism and
oppression. Accordingly, refugees from Communist countries could reasonably expect protection in
the liberal democracies of the West—to the detriment of refugees from right-wing authoritarian
countries, often supported by the USA and its allies. There may have also been a discrepancy
between rhetoric and action on the part of liberal democracies. However, this was embedded in the
fault line between the communism of peoples’ democracies versus the capitalist liberal world, a
dichotomy that is absent from today’s world.
The governments and peoples of European destination countries have distinct coping mechanisms
when it comes to offering refuge. Clearly, there is a huge discrepancy between knowledge about
moral responsibility and behaviour. The tension between (such moral) knowledge and action is often
not resolved, a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957; see also Bauman 2016). As
a consequence of the unresolved discrepancy between moral obligations and inaction or
unwillingness to act upon such duties, responsibility is shifted and externalized. In our case, a
consequence would be to externalize responsibility by identifying (the majority of) forced migrants as
‘illegal migrants’ despite the fact that restrictive border controls around the Mediterranean only allow
for illegal entry into the member states of the EU. Governments of EU states externalize control and
shelter to the periphery of Europe in North Africa and Eastern Europe. More generally,
externalization thus makes it easier to argue that ‘we’ are not responsible (Kleist and Thorsen 2017).
In brief, a moral polity, very much like a moral economy, is built on the logic of appropriateness.
The reasonable expectation of those adversely affected by violence and threat to be granted
protection or at least shelter is out of balance with reality. The result has been, on the part of forced
migrants, an ever increasing tendency toward disappointment of expectations nourished by human
rights conventions (not necessarily directly, but certainly indirectly by widely publicized declarations
of European politicians to apply human rights standards), and, on the part of receiving countries,
efforts to delegitimize various forms of migration and render them illegal. In other words, dual
standards of operation exist in the mechanism of relative deprivation on the part of forced migrants
and cognitive dissonance on the part of the receivers. On the part of the receivers, the labelling of
certain forced migrants as illegitimate refugees and the externalization of control continue to escalate
(cf. Gammeltoft-Hansen 2011).
The analysis so far has centred on liberal democracies in the global North and their dealings with
forced migrants from the global South, and for this reason an emphasis has been placed on rights
discourse. But in those states situated ‘in between’ the situation may be different. Take a case such as
Turkey. The reference to (human) rights in dealing with refugees has been much less pronounced than
in the EU. Moreover, Turkey has not signed the protocol to the Geneva Convention extending its reach
beyond Europe. In this case, Syrian refugees who have entered Turkey since 2011 are not welfare
state subjects with clearly defined human and social rights. Most of them live outside refugee camps
and are self-settled (Stock et al. 2016). In order to legitimize the hosting of about three to four million
refugees from war-torn and devastated Syria, the Turkish government has not used human rights
rhetoric. It has repeatedly proclaimed that Syrian refugees ‘are our Muslim brothers and sisters’ and
has thus emphasized an ‘Islamic solidarity’ discourse and to some extent a ‘common Ottoman
heritage’ discourse (Danış and Nazlı 2018). Such norms cannot be enforced in courts.

Politico-Legal Externalization
A specific term capturing the goal of politico-legal externalization is remote control, that is, the
outsourcing of migration control. The EU began efforts to control its outer borders in the early 1990s
by vetting potential migrants in their countries of origin through visa requirements and checks at
points of embarkation. The historical precursors of such measures can be found in US migration
policies going back to the nineteenth century (Zolberg 2006: 11, 110–13, 240–1). Externalizing
control policies by the EU has been part of the external dimension of Europeanization and has been
characterized by a restrictive and repressive approach (Boswell 2003). Politico-legal externalization
is an integral part of the EU’s GAMM. A tangible manifestation is the Migration Compact and the
New Partnership Framework (2016) which the EU and its member states seek to enter into with states
adjoining their borders. This type of control not only aims at states and governments outside the EU
but also implies subcontracting, and thus achieving rule transmission via international NGOs
(INGOs), such as UNHCR and IOM. These latter organizations act partly as brokers and transmitters
of externalization. UNHCR, given its solid mandate on refugees, has been somewhat better able to
maintain its role as a counterweight to outright externalization (Lavenex 2015). The IOM—true to its
mandate as an intergovernmental organization—has been involved in repatriating but also deporting
migrants and (failed) asylum seekers. The principle upon which legal externalization rests is
conditionality: incentives for cooperation are provided to origin and transit states but also penalties
for non-cooperation in migration control. Incentives and penalties are clearly inscribed into more
general external EU relations. For example, the EU has a readmission clause built into all external
trade agreements since the early 2000s. Nonetheless, even in the face of an uneven transfer of EU
rules, there is room for manoeuvre on the part of the rule recipients. Spaces of sovereignty and
resistance coexist. In other words, sending and transit states are not simply victims of the imposition
of legal rules but have room for manoeuver to negotiate the terms of cooperation. The EU–Turkey
deal of 2016, for example, attests not only to successful externalization on the part of the EU but also
to Turkey’s bridging role in this case (El Qadim 2015).
We can distinguish the manifest and latent function of the transfer of rules and institutions from the
global North to the global South. The manifest function is to reduce ‘migration pressure’ by limiting
migration in the short run and giving potential migrants a life perspective in the regions of origin in
the long run. Yet there is also a latent function. It is to show the efficacy and resoluteness of EU
member state governments and the EU Commission by handling a cross-border phenomenon that
constitutes a potential threat. Thus the addressees of such externalization policies are as much the
voting publics in the EU as they are governments in sending and transit countries, involved (I)NGOs,
and the actual and potential migrants themselves.

Economic Externalization of Costs

In the legal-political realm, externalization means the use of extraterritorial measures to prevent
migrants from setting foot onto the territories of destination countries or making them legally
inadmissible by not considering their claims to protection. Examples of such measures are admission
policies, visa regimes, and mobility or migration partnerships between countries of origin and transit.
There may be truly win-win benefits such as developing the rule of law, honouring human rights, or
resolving conflict. Yet the main outcome has been to avoid the triggering of protection obligations
which set in once asylum seekers reach the jurisdictions of countries that are signatories to the
Geneva Convention and other humanitarian standards applying to forced migrants (Agier 2013). In
other words, restrictions set in before migrants reach their shores, relegating migrants to countries of
first arrival. For example, countries of transit or origin are declared to be a ‘safe third country’ or
‘first country of asylum’. As to the latter, the Dublin III Regulation3 states that the country of arrival is
the one in which the asylum seeker must apply, which has the effect of placing inordinate economic
burdens on Mediterranean countries such as Greece, Spain, and Italy—a sort of internal
externalization within the EU. Other instances are bilateral readmission agreements between Italy and
Libya during the Gaddafi regime, and nowadays efforts by the EU to fend off boats carrying migrants
departing from Libya. Again, additional burdens are placed on third countries to seek to ensure the
protection of migrants’ safety and rights (Atger 2013).
 The consequences of externalization can be observed in the economic and socio-political realm.
Securitizing borders clearly interrupts daily cross-border mobilities: for example, excessive border
control has a negative impact on trade relations and labour mobility between African countries.
Migration control policies in the central Sahara concerning Niger, Chad, Algeria, and Libya have not
only profoundly changed migration practices, but have also contributed to a transformation of local
economic structures, pushing them towards an even greater degree of informality and clandestinity.
Thus, externalization is economically disadvantageous for both transit and origin countries. Meant to
prevent movement to Europe, imposed migration control measures also interrupt intra-African
migration movement. After all, with respect to trans-Saharan migration, only an estimated 10 per cent
to 20 per cent wish to continue their journey to Europe (Brachet 2016). Also, the deportation of
migrants from Africa back to their countries of origin blocks potential knowledge transfer which
proceeds through channels established by migrants who reach their destinations or return voluntarily
(e.g. Schultz 2017). As to the restrictive element of externalization, closer surveillance has not been
effective in reducing the number of deaths at sea in the Mediterranean. As to its preventive aspect,
there is no evidence that the development aid extended in exchange for building up the infrastructure
for migration control on behalf of European powers has brought visible economic development to
North and West African countries (Schapendonk 2017).
Instead, externalizing border control has only securitized borders further (Bigo and Guild 2005).
As a result, more and more migrants must resort to irregular passage in order to get legal access to the
instrument of asylum. In these processes, responsibilities have been shifted to private actors, such as
airlines—another instance of subcontracting the tasks of migration control, thus blurring the
boundaries between public/private realms and giving rise to a sort of hybrid transnational governance
of migration. Also, EU states in Western and Central Europe have sought to shift responsibilities to
states of arrival in the Mediterranean by insisting on readmission of those asylum seekers registered
there. As to internalization in the destination countries themselves, criminal law has been increasingly
used to control migrants, for example when deporting irregular migrants as in the case of the
Netherlands (Staring 2004). Externalization has undermined the human security of movers and has
arguably increased securitization of all residents in emigration, transit, and immigration states, as
suggested by increased controls of those present in border regions, migrants and non-migrants alike
(Aradau and van Munster 2008). Above all, it has increased risks taken in the passage of migrants
across the African continent and from the shores of African countries to Europe. Furthermore, the
principle of non-refoulement has been called into question. Again, the credibility of the EU as a
guardian and enforcer of human rights is diminished by the gap between promises made and actions
taken. In sum, externalization is a strategy used by immigration states without impunity. As much as
possible, the costs of immigration control and unwanted migrants are pushed back to states bordering
the EU and back to emigration regions.
The externalization of migration control and its securitization has deleterious consequences for the
social protection of migrants (Vonk and van Walsum 2013). More restrictive border policies against
forced migrants in the 2000s have rendered it more difficult for irregular migrants to access social
protection. One of the reasons is that irregular migrants are in fear of being detected and deported
even more than before. Also, securitization affects cross-border family and community networks. For
example, informal channels to remit funds between immigration and emigration countries have been
increasingly shut down for security reasons after 9/11 with the rationalization that these channels
could act as conduits for financing terrorism (Cochrane 2015: 94).
There are two options in dealing with externalization and securitization of migration control:
migration management and radical dissidence. The first option is the status quo, namely the
externalization of border control which, at least at times, tends to violate human rights norms for
treating migrants and refugees according to international conventions. The second option interrogates
the practices of destination states and is employed by minority groups that challenge majority
discourses, as suggested variously by Marxist, feminist, and post-colonial theories. The essential
question is: how is it possible to get rid of the power of categorization which oppresses the main
subjects in question—(forced) migrants? It is a truly vexing question. In feminist theory, Judith Butler,
among others, offered an idea, called ‘cross-dressing’ (and related concepts such as parody,
performance, drag)—going back to queer theory (Butler 1990). Usually, cross-dressing means the act
of wearing items of clothing and other accoutrements commonly associated with the opposite sex.
Butler, however, gives it a constructivist spin. According to her, gender has no essence, but is instead
constituted through a repeated and performative ‘citation’ of pre-existing models of gender. For
Butler, apparently dissonant forms of gender performance have the potential to transgress and subvert
sexual norms by revealing all gender to be a copy without an original. In Butler’s view cross-
dressing is inherently subversive. While it is not certain that cross-dressing has this kind of
subversive potential, Butler’s question and suggestion are productive although we always have to
keep in mind that the soft power of semantics exists alongside the hard power of state control.
An example of such a radically dissident statement is: ‘We affirm the people‘s right to migrate
freely.…But the unjust structures and policies of governments and international institutions…force
people to migrate out of necessity and desperation; commodify migrants and rob them and their
families of their rights and dignity; perpetuate modern-day slavery for the interest of profit; and
[serve] monopoly capitalism and not the people’ (International Migrants Alliance 2013). The role of
the state is called criminal in this latter document. This assumption seems to be too one-sided: while
the genesis and foundations of national states can indeed be seen as an outcome of a specific sort of
criminal activity in hoarding the means of coercion in a territory (Tilly 1985), not all of states’
subsequent activities can be subsumed under this heading. This is so especially in those states that
adhere (at times) to some sort of rule of law and thus strive to implement a modicum of human and
civil rights. Seen in this way, a human rights perspective is a key element in challenging the
prerogative of state sovereignty. After all, in the case of gender, there is a dichotomy to be overcome,
ever since Simone de Beauvoir declared gender as socially constructed identities (de Beauvoir
1949). The goal has been to subvert allegedly clear gender identities along a dichotomous
understanding—bursting the bounds of this oppressive dichotomy. In the case of forced migration,
those who resist categorizations along lines such as true refugees vs. bogus asylum seekers appeal to
the same normative reference frame used by many states and advocates of refugee rights, namely the
meta-narrative of human rights. This serves as a foundation to challenge devaluing categorizations
such as ‘bogus asylum seekers’.
Some collective action around these themes has indeed materialized. Empirical research,
including a longitudinal study on Los Angeles, Paris, and Amsterdam from 1970 to 2015, indicates
that (forced) migrants have mobilized, for example, in conjunction with potential coalition partners in
local sites. For instance, beginning in the 1970s, in Los Angeles, the organization of new arrivals
coalesced around established migrant organizations; in Paris and Amsterdam around leftist and class-
based organizations (Nicholls and Uitermark 2016). While there has been considerable variation in
modes of organization and political activism, human rights considerations have played an
increasingly important role in migrant mobilization in all of these cases. This observation also
applies to mobilization among undocumented migrants in Berlin, Montréal, and Paris who are located
at the borders of citizenship regimes in making claims around rights, services, and recognition
(Monforte and Dufour 2011). While the concrete content, conditions, and forms of mobilization vary
greatly among these cities in Europe and North America, coalitions with other groups have helped to
give demands public visibility. It is important to observe that the transnational ties of undocumented
migrants and refugees extending across the cities named and into locales of transit and origin could
only be mobilized in conjunction with local coalitions. In other words, political transnationalization
needed a local counterpart to be at least somewhat effective (Steinhilper 2017). In sum, what is at
stake in most protests by refugees and their advocates is not so much a subversive potential to change
actually existing legal norms, but an appeal to states and international organizations to live up to the
fundamental norms they have signed up to, but which are often subverted by restrictive national
legislation.
Perhaps because of the lack of a coalition between human rights advocates and dissidents, neither
group has succeeded in bringing about a transformation of order away from exclusive state control
and towards individual free choice of movement. There are two structural obstacles to the realization
of human rights in this context. First, there is an imbalance in human rights-based conventions which
favours states vis-à-vis forced migrants. While the Geneva Convention and the respective Protocols,
for example, specify the rights of refugees, there is no similar concretion on the obligations of states.
The consequences are dire. For instance, over the past decade there have been debates on how to
categorize those who lose their habitat and are forced to relocate in the wake of environmental
destruction and climate change. It is unlikely, given the framing of international agreements, that states
will recognize any responsibility in the near future. Second, much of the human rights work of NGOs
engaged in refugee work, such as those active in the Mediterranean, fluctuates between de-
politicization and a focus on saving ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998), and re-politicization in using their
influence to campaign for different border and migration policies (Cuttitta 2017).
While cities have a somewhat more inclusive stance towards migrants (both undocumented and
permanent residents), national states are crucial sorting machines for moving people across borders.
In this context of restriction, the actual and potential destination states have made greater efforts to
distinguish (again) between ‘deserving’ and illegitimate migrants. In Germany, for example, deserving
migrants in the mid-2010s have been those coming from acute and active civil wars (above all from
Syria), whereas those originating in countries with diffuse violence (e.g. Nigeria) have been regarded
more critically (Ahrens 2017). From a welfare state perspective, making the distinction between
deserving and illegitimate migrants serves to separate those ready for integration into education and
the labour market but also the respective national cultures from those who allegedly fit into neither the
economic nor the cultural sphere. These developments add to the welfare paradox. This paradox
shows how the consequences of different forms of transnationalization—people vs. goods and capital
—create tensions in and for states, tensions that are hard to address in a fruitful manner politically but
easy to exploit: migrants can be seen as unwanted economic and welfare competitors. The ‘refugee
crisis’ of 2015 has reinvigorated the welfare magnet hypothesis. This proposition, which has not been
substantiated empirically, says that (forced) migrants, especially those designated as not deserving,
seek refuge in Europe because they want to exploit a generous welfare state. In sum, there are heavy
costs of externalization: remote control enhances right-wing populism because restrictive migration
control can be taken as evidence that there is a clear and eminent danger emerging from cross-border
migration (on the effects of restrictive policies in general, see Brochmann and Hammar 1999).
The Migration–Development–Control Nexus: From Investing Developmental
States to Investing Migrants with Agency

After dissecting migration control, it is necessary to take a deeper look at the promise of development
in the global South which is touted as a goal to be achieved in the context of migration management. In
other words, the growing securitization of European borders and the externalization of control are
inextricably linked to the debate on migration and development. Migrants are held responsible for
developing their countries of origin, and the latter receive development aid in exchange for increased
control of emigration and transit migration. The manifest function of development cooperation in
exchange for migration control is to legitimize restrictive border policies. One of the latent functions
is to shift responsibility for development to cross-border migrants and for control to countries of
origin and transit.
It is important to keep in mind that the newest round of the migration–development debate started
around the turn of the twenty-first century. Since then issues about the way in which and the degree to
which migration can aid or impede socio-economic development have moved to the core of academic
and policy agendas and, once again, the area of political economy (Bakewell 2014). The migration–
development interaction needs to be situated in policy contexts paradigmatic of the transnationalized
social question. The international public discourse on migration and development, especially in the
1960s and 1970s and from the late 1990s onwards, has been concerned mostly with the economic
impact of emigration on the countries of origin. This is also true with respect to the acquisition of
human skills and their flow from emigration to immigration regions—to which labels such as brain
drain, brain waste, and brain circulation have been ascribed. More recent discussions have also
brought into focus the role of cross-border migrants beyond their function as economic agents and as
socio-political agents in the production of conflicts but also conflict mediation and the transfer of
political ideas in transnational spaces (Glick Schiller and Faist 2010).
Although the idea of development of the non-Western world, trumpeted by US president Harry
Truman at the beginning of the Cold War in 1948, has come under severe criticism (e.g. Escobar
1995), its underlying ideology, called developmentalism, is still thriving. In what has been called the
developing world or the global South, development and developmentalism serve as a mirror image of
national welfare statism and continued economic growth in the economically advanced countries of
the global North. Despite fundamental criticism of the concepts underlying developmentalism in
academic research, such as its characterization as a simplistic version of modernization theory (Rist
1996), it has proved very resilient in the practice of policy-making. What has changed, however, are
the programmatic foci, associated with the changing actors who are supposed to make development
happen. Fundamentally, there has been a shift from the national development state of the 1950s and
1960s to three other sets of actors: those in the market, those in civil society, and those on the local
state level. On the state level, emphasis in development programmes has turned away from the
national state to the local state and international organizations under the label of good governance.
According to market liberalization which has attacked national protectionist politics, civil society
actors such as (I)NGOs are supposed to mobilize actors outside the realm of the state.
Developmentalism in the field of migration is still thriving, as expressed in the global remittance hype
since the early 2000s. This trend also reflects the fact that a resource-based, as distinct from a rights-
based, approach is usually supported by international institutions. Civil society and market actors
have entered the scene as newcomers. As to civil society, the diaspora has emerged on a semantic
level as the collective agent enabling development through all sorts of remittances, not only financial,
but also social, such as Western ideas of democracy and gender equality. A seminal trend has been to
conceive of the diaspora not as a fifth column, as in the times of the Cold War, but as a major actor of
civil society. Diaspora points to migrants and their families as significant development actors,
following upon categories such as peasants and women who were touted from the 1970s onwards as
crucial agents of change. All of this suggests that there have been ever new reincarnations of
developmentalism in the sense of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return of the same’ (Nietzsche 1974
[1882], Book IV, Aphorism: 341).
By and large, three phases of the migration–development nexus can be distinguished: phase 1,
starting off optimistically, with a focus on remittances and return in the 1950s and 1960s; phase 2,
more sceptical, emphasizing underdevelopment and migration, exemplified by the perpetuation of
poverty and the brain drain in the 1980s and partly the 1990s; and, in a sort of return to phase 1, phase
3 with a celebration of transnational ties of migrants as conducive for development since the early
2000s. Phases 1 and 3 look similar in that cross-border migration is held to have beneficial effects on
development. Yet phases 1 and 3 are still distinct in that in phase 3 there is less focus on the national
state. The in-between phase 2 is characterized by a sceptical view. The fundamental claims
associated with the migration–development enthusiasm presented in current academic and policy
discourses since the early 2000s are not as new as they appear. Looking at the past seventy years, that
is, when development became established as a policy field and as a discourse in both the
industrialized states, on the one hand, and the technologically modernizing and often decolonizing
states on the other, considerable similarities but also some important shifts in the thinking can be
observed. From a simple cost–benefit point of view, the original idea posits that the flow of
emigrants and the accompanying brain drain from emigration regions are partly or wholly
compensated for by a reverse flow of money, ideas, and knowledge. Over time, this perspective has
been challenged by more critical evaluations rejecting the potential of migration for development.
With a slightly different emphasis and with new political instruments, the positive view on potentials
has returned. It is not surprising that the conceptualization of the nexus between migration and
development mirrors the dominant development paradigms and their changes over the decades.

Phase 1: Migration and Development—Remittances and Return

In phase 1, during the 1950s and 1960s, public policy emphasized the need to fill ‘labour gaps’ in the
global North with migrant workers and thereby also contribute to development in the global South.
The latter was supposed to result from financial remittances, return migration, and the subsequent
transfer of skills and knowledge that cross-border migration involved (Kindleberger 1967). This
view corresponded to overall economic modernization concepts in development thinking and to a
belief that national state capacity could shape economic growth as well as control migration
according to national needs. Moreover, it was congruent with the textbook mantra in economics,
which suggests that the emigration of surplus labour from underdeveloped areas leads to a new
equilibrium between capital and labour (Lewis 1954): if labour goes North, labour scarcities in the
South should then attract inflows of capital and, eventually, lead to economic development in the
South. This academic thinking was mirrored in policies: both sending and receiving states of migrant
workers articulated the need for temporariness and return based on the expectation that returnees
brought new knowledge and qualifications with them. In fact, most research was actually undertaken
after restrictive migration policies had been (re)implemented in the early 1970s (e.g. Penninx 1982
on Turkey). Following the end to recruitment in Western Europe, public policies aimed to encourage
migrants to return to their regions of origin. Financial incentives were allotted to those returning.
Nonetheless, retrospectively, critical voices asked whether the magnitude of cross-border
migration was sufficiently high to have a significant impact in creating labour scarcities in the
emigration countries and thus a need for the introduction of more advanced technologies. In addition,
it seemed questionable whether financial remittances were of a scale that went beyond consumption
and contributed to an increase in productivity and economic growth (Hermele 1997). Up until the late
1970s, when the first studies were published on the effects of remittances, social scientists and
governments alike tended to see migration as a solution to development obstacles in emigration
regions. Empirical results, however, to an increasing degree painted a different picture, often
concluding that there was little evidence that remittances boosted local, not to mention national,
economic development. Moreover, there was little evidence of a decline of fundamental inequalities,
irrespective of the finding that migration can indeed increase socio-economic opportunities of
individuals and small groups.

Phase 2: Underdevelopment and Migration—Poverty and the Brain Drain

During phase 2—in which dependency theory and later on world systems theory (Wallerstein 1974)
criticized developmentalist modernization theory—the nexus was conceptualized in reverse. Rather
than working from migration to development the assumed causality moved from underdevelopment to
migration (Portes and Walton 1981). Interestingly, this criticism from the academic left dovetailed
nicely with restrictionist migration policies actually implemented in OECD countries: if migration
contributes to underdevelopment and restrictive policies curb movement across borders, the solution
is investment in places of origin furthering national development, from a dependency point of view
dissociated from the world market (cf. Hiemenz and Schatz 1979). In this phase, during much of the
1970s and 1980s, the term development came to be replaced by dependency as a structural condition
of the periphery dominated by the centre, and underdevelopment was seen as its inevitable result.
Brain drain was one of the most important concerns in this period. In a dependency perspective,
underdevelopment led to the loss of the well-educated and most qualified individuals, who migrated
from the periphery to the centres in the dependent world and, above all, to industrialized countries.
This out-migration, in turn, was thought to contribute to even more underdevelopment and increased
migration flows through an asymmetric distribution of benefits and resources working in favour of the
economically developed centres. At the same time, from the early 1970s most European countries
started to cut off official recruitment and closed their main gates, keeping only side doors open for
selected categories of immigrants in sectors which required the production of goods and services on
the spot, such as construction, tourism, care, and health.
Although current assessments tend now to highlight positive linkages, evidence for the brain drain
thesis is easy to spot nowadays as well. For example, in 2005, between one-third and one-half of the
so-called developing world’s science and technology personnel lived in OECD countries. Even
nuanced accounts of the positive effects through return, investment, and educational benefits make
note of ‘brain strain hotspots’ where out-flow is not balanced by counter-flows and thus severely
hampers socio-economic development (Lowell, Findlay, and Stewart 2004). This is the case, for
instance, for greater parts of the health sector in sub-Saharan Africa where the WHO warned of the
damaging effects of this care drain (e.g. Stilwell et al. 2004). In stark contrast to many African
countries suffering from brain drain, countries developing quickly along economic lines, such as
Taiwan, South Korea, and the People’s Republic of China, have increasingly managed to re-attract
students and experts from abroad and thus could change the situation into ‘reverse brain drain’ (Zweig
2006). These stand at the centre of public attention in the current third phase.

Phase 3: Migration and (Co-)Development—The Celebration of Transnational

Circulation
We have moved into phase 3 which has been underway since the late 1990s. In this phase the idea of
what in French policy circles has been called co-développement best describes the dominant public
policy approaches (Diangitukwa 2008). This idea puts the migrant at the centre of attention
identifying him or her as the development agent par excellence, connecting both places of origin and
destination through remittances and other forms of exchange. In this phase the migrant has been
constituted as an element of development cooperation. Along with that goes a reversal of the nexus
taking us back to a more optimistic view, akin to the 1960s. Again, nowadays, cross-border migration
is supposed to fuel socio-economic development. Most emphasis is placed on financial remittances
and many attempts aim at facilitating and channelling individual and collective money transfers. In
addition, skills, flows of knowledge, and social remittances have also gained significance (Maimbo
and Ratha 2005), congruent with ideas about the importance of civil society and its social capital in
the form of trust and reciprocity for political democratization and social equality, such as gender
equality.
Current initiatives thus cover a wider range of topics around the circulation of people, money, and
ideas. First, temporary and circular migration are presented as the ideal combination contributing to
economic development by way of remittances while at the same time curtailing brain drain through
early return and re-insertion (de Haas 2010). Such perspectives are reflected in many policy
recommendations, for example those of the Global Commission to increase opportunities for short-
term labour migration (GCIM 2005; see also Chapter 4). Second, temporary return and brain
circulation are among the allegedly new measures. Not only permanent return migration but also
temporary stays, shorter visits, and other forms of mobility promoting knowledge transfer are thought
to address development issues. For instance, ‘diaspora knowledge networks’ (J.-B. Meyer 2011),
composed of scientists and research and development personnel, business start-up entrepreneurs, and
professionals working for multinational companies (Rauch 2001), are supported by states,
development agencies, and international organizations such as the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) or the IOM. Third, this recent approach addresses the circular transactions of
established migrant groups and diasporic communities in community development and post-conflict
reconstruction. All of this requires the constitution not only of migrants as individual actors of
development but also diaspora communities as collective identities spurring development. In this
third phase, new actors are being heavily promoted by the sending and receiving states as well as
through inter- and supranational agencies. An understanding of the development–migration nexus is
critical for the transnationalized social question because the developmental state in the global South
is a functional equivalent to national welfare states in the global North. While the developmental state
as a policy-guiding tenet has not been cast away, the move away from its national to local, inter-, and
cross-border versions signifies a massive transnationalization of the migration–development nexus in
the course of market liberalization pushed by international organizations such as the World Bank and
the IMF.
Phase 3 in policy clearly took off with the wake-up call by the World Bank in its report on
development finance (World Bank 2002).4 Now, concepts such as increasing competitiveness,
recruiting the highly skilled, and other key notions came to dominate the policy debate. In tune with
globalization talk, concepts such as circularity assumed greater importance (GCIM 2005), in addition
to efforts at tapping into the benefits brought about by return migrants. Terms such as brain gain, later
modified to brain circulation, came to replace brain drain. In the Lisbon Treaty (2002), the EU itself
now declared its aim to compete on a par with the United States in attracting the so-called highly
skilled. In addition, a second demographic transition in most immigration states led to renewed
discussions about attracting migrants to make up for a shrinking labour supply and for an increase in
the number of pensioners over the coming decades (for a criticism of the view that an ageing
population is a threat to economic growth and social security systems, see Straubhaar 2016). As a
legitimizing strategy to engage in attracting highly skilled migrants, this development policy for the
global North was placed in the context of helping countries in the South to develop their economies,
and, again a direct demand by the EU, to build up their migration control infrastructure. This latter
issue has been of particular relevance with respect to states such as Algeria, Morocco, Senegal,
Tunisia, Turkey, and Ukraine, most of them bordering on the EU and being transit countries for
migrants from further afield.
The very fact that a reappraisal of the migration–development nexus has been going on for some
years now means that a couple of the perceptions of negative effects of migration upon development,
so prevalent in phase 2, have changed. Indeed, this changing perception would not have been possible
without a much broader transformation of the principles underlying social order. Such a sea change
can be identified on the discursive level and in institutional and policy domains. If, for heuristic
purposes, we define three principles of social order as state, market, and civil society or community,
we can trace the shifting emphasis of the public policy-making and research agendas over the past
several decades, since development entered the lexicon of public debate in the late 1940s. Two
discursive and policy shifts, both of them combinatorial forms including civil society or community,
have been apparent since the 1980s and 1990s. The overarching characteristic is a move away from
the national state (apparatus) as an engine and coordinator of development. One important mechanism
of social order has gained importance: market (liberalism) has turned into market fundamentalism,
sometimes called neo-liberalism, characterized by marketization in the form of commodification
(Castles 2015), deregulation of markets, and privatization of collective goods. The underlying idea is
that markets should be self-regulating rather than state-controlled, neglecting the historical experience
that the creation of markets demands the visible hand of the state (H.-J. Chang 2003). The
implementation of fundamentalist market principles implies a self-guided withdrawal by the state
from the provision of central public services. This process was in many countries of the global South
introduced forcibly by the implementation of Structural Adjustment Programmes (Delgado Wise
2014), which led to different forms of social transformation in society. Such globalization in practice
can facilitate ‘transnationalism from above’, meaning, for instance, the unrestricted entrance of
foreign capital. Especially in the case of rural areas this has triggered land grabbing, leading to the
displacement of small-scale farmers and marginalized population segments from their croplands
(Sassen 2014). Similarly, the entrance of foreign capital has also destroyed small-scale production
farms and rural livelihoods, for instance by the implementation of biotechnologies (Pechlaner and
Otero 2008), which required the purchase of modified seeds for cultivation. As this kind of
technology is often unaffordable for most rural dwellers for financial reasons, the gradual exclusion
of small-scale farmers from agriculture is the likely result.
The criticism of the ‘civil religion of development’ (Rist 1996) from the 1980s onwards has
called into question the idea of a homogeneous global South (formerly often called the Third World;
spaces 3 and 4 in Chapter 4), notions of progress, and, most important for our inquiry, relations
between the state, civil society, and community (Schuurman 2000). The changing conceptualizations
of the state, the market, and civil society over the past fifty years in the development debate may
signal a transnationalization of these terms. This can be usefully illustrated in the relationship
between, first, the state and civil society and community; second, the market and civil society and
community; and third, family. Overall, social policy and development thinking has moved from a
focus on the national state as the prime mover of economic development to market fundamentalism,
implying a greater emphasis on local government, international institutions (Mkandawire 2004), and
what is called civil society. Therefore, we have to broaden our concepts and speak not simply of the
state but of statehood on various levels—local, national, supra-, and international statehood.
Moreover, as the enthusiasm over the concepts of diasporas and transnational communities indicates,
civil society also has to be conceptualized as a transnational civil society. Underlying all the changes
to be discussed has been the belief in the benefits of increased marketization, frequently referred to as
the Washington Consensus (see also Stiglitz 2008).5

Statehood and Civil Society

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s modernization theory guided a belief in the central role of the
national developmental state. Strong state bureaucracies and developmental dictatorships were the
privileged actors in promoting industrialization, modern education, literacy, and modernist thinking. A
partial shift throughout the 1970s towards basic needs strategies targeting increasing poverty and
malnutrition brought more attention to still rather diffuse notions of community and civil society in the
search for grassroots and self-help initiatives. In addition, lower levels of government have gained
importance here as well. In the face of decentralization and its attendant slogans, such as ownership
and stakeholdership, local governments, along with civil society and community, have assumed a
greater role.
It has been in this context that migrants were introduced in the 1990s as a civil society or
community actor, either as individuals remitting funds or as migrant associations in the form of
diasporic or transnational communities. In immigration states such as France vis-à-vis West African
states, the aforementioned idea of co-development in phase 3 of the migration–development nexus
sees migrants as their own development agents regarding sending countries. From this perspective,
migrants and their diasporas alleviate poverty and help to solve conflicts, especially if local
governments work with diaspora groups to deliver better results. Beyond France, examples can be
found in Spain and Italy, but also in the UK and the Netherlands. This focus on local authorities and
diasporas has come to be especially relevant in situations where decentralization, community
development, and civil society participation have generally gained importance, whether as a result of
new policies or as a reflection of the fact that many national states in the global South had barely
managed to establish territorial domination and the rule of law, to institutionalize democracy, or to
launch sustained economic development. Here, hope is invested in the prospect of NGOs and local
governments working in a synergetic collaboration with diasporas.
 The manifestations of public–private partnerships arising in this context are ambiguous. Although
countries of origin may be better off thanks to the active involvement of migrants, the targeting of
matching grants as a poverty reduction tool is questionable (Aparicio and Meseguer 2012). Numerous
studies report failed public–private partnerships with migrant participation; they are often fraught
with conflicts with community residents or local politicians and subject to clientelistic exchanges
similar to those they are supposed to ameliorate (Fox and Bada 2008).
Nonetheless, national states continue to play a crucial role in supporting cross-border ties. For
example, while previously the government of the People’s Republic of China invoked return for
serving the country, this rhetoric has changed to the slogan ‘serve the country’ (Nyíri 2010: 637). In
this fashion, the desire to relate more intensively with respective diaspora groups is likely to
correspond to interest in sustaining existing cross-border ties and practices of migrants with people in
their home country, because these bonds are associated with financial returns, in the form of either
remittances or investments (Portes and Zhou 2012). As some migration scholars stress, rising amounts
of family- and community-based financial remittances over recent years are seen by some emigration
country institutions as a way to promote development or are even used strategically in bargaining for
external loans (Guarnizo 2003). This perceived development potential of migrants can represent a
major factor for discursive and institutional changes in traditional sending countries, which can be
reflected, for example, in the recognition of multiple citizenships. In the past, the idea of having two
or more political identities had a highly negative connotation, because it was associated with non-
integration into the host society, low levels of political loyalty, or undermining of civic principles in
election processes. These perceptions have changed over recent decades, and multiple political
memberships are increasingly seen as a challenge that needs to be negotiated from standpoints ranging
from (mostly) pragmatic tolerance to active encouragement (Faist 2010b: 1676). The causes for this
institutional shift are manifold and are related to the influence of international discourses on national
citizenship policies, the political recognition that social integration can be promoted via dual
citizenship, or the official acknowledgement of migrants’ transnationality through the allowance of
dual memberships.

The Market and Transnational Civil Society

Not only have statehood–civil society relations changed but so, too, have the linkages between the
market and civil society. Communities and civil society are becoming more and more a complement
to liberal economic approaches. The notion of social capital as touted, for example, by the World
Bank, is the very fusion of market-oriented thought with civil society ideas: social resources, such as
trust and networks of reciprocity, are seen as productive elements for both economic growth and
democratization. Two fundamentally different views are in circulation—liberal economic thought, on
the one hand, and participatory approaches, on the other. Yet both favour migrant agency for
development. The first line of thought emphasizes the market migrant, the second the political migrant.
Liberal economic thought would suggest that migrants are their own best development agents. A UK
House of Commons report (2004) touting diasporas as development agents approvingly cites John
Kenneth Galbraith (Galbraith 1979: 7), who described migration as ‘the oldest action against
poverty’. The commitment of cross-border migrants to their regions of origin is seen as compatible
with the concept of the market citizen, who is not necessarily a political citizen. This focus on the
economically entrepreneurial citizen in the market is distinct from the politically active citizen in
grassroots perspectives. This second, political perspective is reflected in the fact that participatory
approaches, as expressed, for example, by a United Nations Development Programme report (UNDP
2002: 1), focus on collective remittances. In line with this way of thinking, migrants’ collectives in all
forms—hometown associations, diaspora knowledge networks, businesspersons’ networks, and even
religious congregations—are engaged by governments. It is therefore no coincidence that organized
migrant groups such as hometown associations in Mexico, returnee associations in Jamaica, or
charitable foundations in Egypt have gained importance in political discourse and sometimes in
policy-making. At times, migrant organizations can challenge institutions and their practices and
thereby influence them. An example of this process is the frequent interrogations of the role of the
state of origin in the development process by migrant organization representatives (Bada 2016),
through which political pressure is exercised and political processes are influenced.
The smaller socio-economic units such as families are key in the migration–development nexus
(see also Chapter 6). Cross-border migration today has resulted in the increased prevalence of what
have been called transnational families—families with members living in different national states.
Research on these families has been spurred by the understanding of the gendered nature of mobility,
in particular the feminization of migration, that is, that an increasing share of women are moving as
independent migrants and not as spouses joining their husbands or remaining separated, and being
employed above all in specific sectors such as care (Tittensor and Mansouri 2017). The
decentralization and deregulation of manufacturing production and the demand for professional
services that require service labour, such as care work in the health, domestic, and other sectors, have
contributed to consistently increasing cross-border mobilities and concomitant ties. Of special
interest is that more and more transnational families must remain spatially separated, whether due to
newer types and patterns of migration or restrictive immigration laws (Kraler et al. 2011). At the
same time we see that migrants can now more easily stay in touch with their significant others owing
to easier travel conditions, the Internet, and other forms of telecommunication previously unavailable.
There are thus not only local communities without geographical propinquity, but also families without
propinquity.
There is nothing fundamentally new about the fact that migrants often remain in contact with and
continue to send resources to those back home. What is truly novel is the ideological setting which
has replaced the state-centred development policy paradigm with the market cum civil society
paradigm. Programmes based on such approaches have been pushed by international organizations
such as the World Bank, by development cooperation organizations, and by national states. European
immigration countries concentrate their development cooperation policies on countries bordering the
EU in the south and the east, such as the Joint EU–Africa Strategy. As we have seen before, EU
policies and public policies of member states increasingly link development cooperation with
externalized migration control, putting more emphasis on the legitimacy of national economic interests
in admitting highly qualified workers.
The deployment of migrants as development agents, along with increased endeavours by
international organizations, local and national states, and NGOs to create incentives for migrants to
become involved in promoting development, can be observed on two levels. On one level, individual
migrants, vested with economic skills and social ties, are the focus: migrants return as highly
qualified workers for brief assignments to their countries of origin or develop small-scale projects on
their own initiative—for example, medical doctors in the health sector. On a second, collective level,
the focus is on families and above all migrant self-organizations that not only support relatives and
friends in their countries of origin but also become involved in activities such as building water wells
or schools. In some European countries, sometimes in cooperation with international organizations,
there are now state programmes that combine the periodic return of migrants and their involvement
with development cooperation (see also Portes and Fernández-Kelly 2015).
It should be noted, however, that such programmes—the co-développement scheme in France, for
instance—were originally created to encourage the return of migrants to their home countries in West
and Central Africa, and are built on close and politically asymmetric ties from colonial times. To the
point, the French case is a cross-border, translocal scheme with bilateral elements. Today such
schemes combine incorporation, development, and migration control policies by supporting local
projects run by migrants. The international level has become more important, given the involvement
of international organizations such as the UNDP, the ILO, the IOM, and INGOs such as Oxfam. It is
thus no coincidence that immigration countries with strong post-colonial ties have been more active in
pushing co-development schemes than those without (e.g. France, Spain, and the UK vis-à-vis
Germany).
Seen against the background of the foregoing discussion on externalization, the migration–
development nexus is not simply about social mobility and socio-economic or perhaps even political
change in the global South. It is inextricably bound to concerns over migration control voiced by
immigration states. Here, mainly state-driven control is discussed. Yet it should not be forgotten that
emigration control is also found in families and communities—for example, gender-specific controls
on the emigration of women are relatively common across South Asia (Collyer 2013: 10). In short,
the debates around the migration–development nexus are also connected to concerns for security,
migration control, and a coupling of migration control and development aid, and sometimes also to
maintaining male dominance. In short, it is useful to speak of a migration–development–control nexus.
According to supranational entities such as the EU, one of the fundamental ideas at the core of current
debates and efforts is that an increase in development leads to a decrease in migration. A number of
initiatives on bilateral and multilateral levels, in particular within the EU, are closely bound to this
approach to development cooperation; cooperation in the management of migration between countries
of origin, destination, and transit; the fight against irregular migration; return and readmission
agreements; and the synergies of migration and development, in particular with regard to remittances.
Since the European Council’s Presidency Conclusion of the Tampere summit in 1999, the
collaboration of third countries in the management of migration is closely linked to international
cooperation, trade, and aid (Faist and Ette 2007). In general, partnerships with third countries, in
particular at the European periphery, are based on policies which make development aid conditional
upon their willingness to collaborate in combating irregular migration. In 2012, the EU adopted
GAMM, the successor to the Global Approach on Migration of 2005 (M. Martin 2015). Under this
umbrella, the EU pursues mobility partnerships with major migrant-sending regions and countries,
and, while still perceiving migration as a security threat, places emphasis on the need for ‘mobility
partnerships’ and migration as a ‘development lever’. The Cotonou Agreement (2000: entered into
force in 2003), for instance, regulating the partnership of the EU with the African, Caribbean, and
Pacific (ACP) countries in matters of development cooperation, economic trade, and political
dimensions, foresees the return and readmission ‘of any of its nationals who are illegally present on
the territory of a Member State of the European Union, at that Member State’s request and without
further formalities’ (Council of the European Union 2005: Article 13).
To entice ACP countries to agree to the readmission of what are deemed irregular migrants, the EU
has offered selective incentives. In light of these new policy measures for promoting migrants as
development brokers, certain attributes of migrants that were hitherto regarded as drawbacks—such
as fence sitting, that is, sitting in between emigration and immigration countries—are re-interpreted as
mobility competencies, and thus assets, in this case as bridge builders and brokers. In short, cross-
border ties and associated resources, indeed the very transnationality of migrants, has become a
characteristic of development and thus also social protection. Transnationality refers, for instance, to
commitments in migrants’ regions of origin, which were formerly seen as an indicator of non-
integration or a failure of integration by immigration states. From the perspective of the new policies,
integration in the country of immigration is seen as being entirely compatible with transnational
involvement and commitments in the country of origin. Transnational activists as a rule still have their
local roots in their regions of origin and use them as a basis for transborder involvement (cf. Tarrow
2005). This can be seen, for example, in the activities of African organizations in Germany that are
involved in development cooperation and help with the building of schools or water systems
(Sieveking 2011).

Outlook: Internalization of Global Inequalities

The analysis in this chapter suggests that the migration–control and migration–development nexus
have increasingly merged into a development–migration–control nexus: resources for development
cooperation are connected by the donors to the willingness of the receivers to cooperate on matters of
migration control. This is a direct outcome of efforts by countries in the European global North to
exercise remote control and thus externalize not only controls but also the costs of control (Gaibazzi,
Dünnwald, and Bellagamba 2016). The control part of the nexus has not only resulted in
externalization but also internalization, that is, the securitization of control not only as a form of
outsourcing and thus remote control but also internalization. In a nutshell, as ‘borders have expanded
outwards, they also have expanded inwards’ (Hansen and Papademetriou 2014: 3).
Detection, detention, and deportation are among the most visible practices in many immigration
states nowadays. Immigration regulations and asylum procedures (e.g. for refugees who have a
subsidiary status and therefore have to return to countries of origin upon the end of violence) have
made it increasingly difficult to bring their spouses. These challenges have implications for social
protection arrangements in families, as practices such as sending remittances are getting more
difficult (e.g. Carling, Menjívar, and Schmalzbauer 2012). In sum, internalization of migration control
has consequences for social stratification and thus inequalities within national states. Whereas
externalization excludes migrants from the territory and evades the challenges of the liberal and the
welfare paradox, internalization establishes inequalities among migrants.
In the end, externalization and internalization are inextricably connected. The refugee situation that
arose in the 2010s illustrates how EU institutions and EU member state governments react to the
alleged threat of uncontrolled inflows of asylum seekers through incremental and context-specific
change. The effort to control this influx can lead to the violation of humanitarian principles. In
Germany, for example, the objective of managing humanitarian migration has led to different and
sometimes contradictory political and policy responses. This is evident in the recently adopted
amendments on the asylum law: while admission policies targeted at forced migrants became on the
one hand stricter and more selective (e.g. the simplified deportation of criminal asylum seekers in the
European context; see De Genova and Peutz (2010) who speak of a ‘deportation regime’), at the same
time more financial and public resources were dedicated to the integration of refugees (e.g. the
doubling of financial resources for language courses). Admission and integration are intricately
linked: in Germany, for instance, debates emerged in 2017 over family reunification of asylum
seekers and refugees, with reunification seen as either a burden on the capacity to integrate a
relatively high number of refugees compared to the recent past or as an important contribution to
integration of refugees because, in this view, families facilitate adaptation to a new environment.
Since much of border politics and policies by states can be conceived of as a response to threatened
identities and security, one may ask about the function of borders beyond controlling migrants. Border
walls and externalization efforts are not a sign of strength (Brown 2010). Instead, they may be a clue
that state control is slowly being challenged by processes of transnationalization. Yet it is one of the
very visible areas of transnationalization in which national states and supranational entities such as
the EU can show competence by directly addressing the volume of transactions across borders. These
politics primarily fulfil an important symbolic role, by providing a reassuring image of security to a
population whose job positions have partly migrated elsewhere or whose welfare states have been
transformed. There is no reliable empirical evidence that migrants constitute competitors to jobs or—
overall—a burden on welfare states in the global North (Kuş 2018). In a way, the externalization of
border politics and policies may be more about citizens of states than it is about migrants.
Such processes in immigration countries, mostly those in the OECD world, have a mirror image in
countries of emigration. The functional equivalent to the welfare state in OECD countries of the
global North, even with some changes that led to a greater emphasis on the market, civil society, and
the local state, has been the transformed developmental state in the global South. Through Structural
Adjustment Programmes, market fundamentalism and liberalism have also been implemented in most
of these countries. Partly driven by the failure of market liberalization to garner sustained growth in
quite a few countries, brain drain and brawn drain—the exit of professionals, skilled workers, and
others—has evolved as a counterpoint to attracting the highly skilled in immigration countries. New
development agents have been constituted as migration and development entered the agendas of
international and supranational organizations and national states in the global North. A visible sign is
the role of diasporas who have turned to development issues after the Cold War. And securitization
becomes relevant because emigration has acted as a safety valve for authoritarian regimes to get rid
of their political opposition. Attention to the issues of brain drain, brain gain or brain circulation, and
the role of diasporas in development has been heightened by EU programmes, such as GAMM, which
connect cooperation in the realm of control of migration and asylum in exchange for development aid.
A number of Mobility Partnerships have been signed so far with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cape Verde,
Georgia, Moldova, Morocco, and Tunisia (Teodorescu 2017). It is within such policy initiatives that
asymmetries in the power to shape migration policies between emigration and immigration states
become blatantly visible. While the mobility of highly skilled migrants has been given prominent
space in discourses around migration and development, migrants on other skill levels have been given
short shrift and have entered the picture mostly as objects of control and burdens to welfare states in
immigration states.

Notes
1. https://missingmigrants.iom.int.
2. Forced migration constitutes a significant share of migration worldwide. Globally, in 2014, there were about 240 million migrants;
among those were about sixty million forced migrants. Among forced migrants, about seventeen million were classified as refugees
according to the Geneva Convention. The majority of forced migrants come from five war zones: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan,
and Syria. Not included in these numbers are the approximately thirty-five million IDPs and those fleeing due to environmental
 degradation or due to development-induced displacement and, increasingly, climate change (http://gmdac.iom.int/global-migration-
trends-factsheet).
The Dublin III Regulation (Regulation No. 604/2013) determines the EU member state responsible for handling an application for
3. asylum seekers seeking protection under the Geneva Convention
(https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/656666/dublin-III-regulation-
v1_0.pdf).
4. The mandate of the World Bank is to provide loans and credit to countries in the global South for projects that alleviate poverty and
provide social and economic development.
5. The term ‘Washington Consensus’ was initially coined in 1989 by economist John Williamson to describe a set of ten specific
economic policy prescriptions (fiscal policy discipline, redirection of public spending, trade liberalization, etc.) that he considered
should constitute the ‘standard’ reform package promoted for crisis-wracked countries in the global South by institutions such as the
IMF, the World Bank, and the US Treasury Department. Subsequently, the term has come to be used in a different and broader
sense, as a synonym for market fundamentalism. In this way, the term has been associated with neo-liberal policies in general and
has entered the wider debate over the expanding role of the free market and constraints upon state social and economic policies.
8

Immigration
Internalizing the Social Question

The transnationalized social question concerns not just social inequalities between and within
immigration, emigration, and transit countries but also the contentious politics around them. The
externalization of migration control which functions to avoid the challenges of the welfare paradox
and the liberal paradox is already an indication of how contentious migration issues have contributed
to the transnationalized social question. Within national states, the struggles around inequalities and
claims for equality involve the entanglement of both socio-economic and cultural issues. In Western
Europe, cultural heterogeneities have been increasingly at the centre of public debate on migration
and integration. We have seen an increasing political salience of heterogeneities such as ethnicity,
religion, nationalism, and gender in the politics of immigrant incorporation (e.g. Phillimore, Sigona,
and Tonkiss 2017). The politicized heterogeneities involved have been changing over time, as
expressed in the changing semantics around immigrants. In Germany, for example, they moved from
‘worker’ (class) in the 1960s to ‘nationality’ (in its double meaning as a legal aspect of citizenship
and ethnicity within a national state) in the 1980s, and further to ‘religion’ (culture) from the late
1990s onwards (Faist 2004).
This politics of culture has figured in the debates and conflicts around the importance of
heterogeneities in two ways. First, cultural heterogeneities nowadays seem to occupy a more
prominent place than class in debates on immigrant integration—class understood in the Weberian
sense as market-based positions in social stratification which determine socio-economic and political
opportunities through material resources (Weber 1968 [1922]: 302–7, 927–31). Nonetheless, class
and culture as the axes around which the politics of integration revolve may not be mutually exclusive
modes (Chapter 2). Debates on the cultural backwardness of migrants concern only selected segments
of migrants and are often class-specific. Market liberalization has led to a stronger divide between
high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants. This means that not all migrants are perceived in the same
way. It is above all low-skilled migrants whose fit for cultural integration has been cast in doubt by
anti-immigrant voices who are seen as constituting a social problem. Second, while claims to
acknowledging cultural diversity or even cultural rights can be interpreted as part of the individual
‘rights revolution’ (Sunstein 1993), with an extension to group rights, it is counteracted by politics
striving for cultural homogeneity on the national level, expressed by the politics of anti-immigrant
populism, also exercised by mainstream political parties and right-wing populism. Populism tends to
divide and thus simplify the political sphere into two distinct camps (Laclau 2005), championing the
‘people’ over the ‘political elite’. These tendencies conceive of migrants as a threat to physical,
ontological, and social security—that is, they are objects of a process of securitization.
Several questions are posed here. What have been the main issues and heterogeneities around
which immigration has been politicized and what are the underlying tensions and paradoxes? How
have inequalities between migrants and native populations and between categories of migrants been
(re)produced around culturalized and securitized politics on the national level of immigration
countries? The claim put forward is that the two tensions between market liberalization and de-
commodification, and between cultural pluralism and securitization constitute the core of the
transnationalized social question in immigration states, and are driving the politics of inequalities and
thus integration in those states. In this branch of politics, class and culture are somewhat intertwined
in that class co-structures how culture arises, without fully determining the politics of culture which
has its own dynamics. In order to support these propositions, this analysis outlines the master
processes driving the politics around the social question. The master processes are market
liberalization as market fundamentalism, de-commodification, cultural pluralism based on the rights
revolution, and securitization—with oppositions between market liberalization and social rights of
both migrants and established citizens in the economic realm, and between cultural rights and
securitization in the cultural realm. The analysis outlines and further develops a typology of migrants
as economically ‘wanted’ and/or culturally ‘welcome’, which arises from the two sets of tensions
already encountered: the welfare paradox and the liberal paradox. The typology also encompasses
four modes of insertion of migrants in immigration states: integration, discrimination, tolerance, and
exclusion. The role played by individual rights, interestingly enough, is ambiguous: the rights
revolution drives market liberalization and at the same time often serves as a counter-movement
against securitization. While the framework of analysis is meant to apply—with great variations
across countries—to West European immigration states, the empirical reference for most of the
analysis is the German case. In other words, the analysis focuses on commonalities across Western
Europe, despite the fact that there are important differences to be accounted for (e.g. Hampshire
2013).
The remainder of this chapter discusses the master processes driving the politics around migration
and integration. The first part describes the four master processes which make for more open
immigration policies (market liberalization and cultural pluralism) and those favouring more
restrictive policies (de-commodification and securitization). The second part delves deeper into the
acrimony between market liberalization (viewing migrants as human capital) and de-commodification
(the ability to make a living independent of market participation) in welfare states. It also includes a
section which describes the counter-movement against market liberalization, pushing migrant social
rights as human rights. The third part discusses in greater detail the acrimonious relationship between
migration as a threat (securitization) and cultural pluralism based on (multi)cultural rights. Again, this
part concludes with a section on struggles for equality based on the rights revolution. The fourth part
deals with the implications of inclusion and exclusion concerning migrants for their integration into
national states. The outlook then concludes with reflections on the increasing significance of politics
in the realms of culture and status without implying the disappearance of class-based politics.

The Four Master Processes: Market Liberalization, De-Commodification, the

Rights Revolution, and Securitization
The dynamics of market liberalization, de-commodification, cultural pluralism based on the rights
revolution, and securitization have been spurred by changes in the economic sphere overall. The key
economic shifts since the 1970s have been twofold. First, as productivity growth has declined since
the late 1970s, income and wealth inequality within most countries around the globe have increased.
Workers have experienced a decreased income share, since wages in most cases have not matched
even the low productivity growth. Also, public wealth redistribution has been significantly reduced
through tax cuts for the wealthy and lower social transfers for the rest (Scocco 2017). A drastic
graphic representation of this development is the ‘elephant curve’ (Milanovic 20161) which suggests
that—although globally speaking (if the world were one country) no major groups have experienced
significant income loss and indeed poverty has been reduced—substantive income growth has been
limited to the rising middle classes in economic transition countries (space 2 in Chapter 4) and the
top 1 per cent (spaces 1 and 2); the same holds for income and growth within countries in the period
from 1988 to 2008. What is even more important for the politics of inequalities is that the middle
classes in the industrialized countries of the global North are located with respect to income growth
in a trough in between the lower classes and the middle classes in developing economies on the one
hand and the top 1 per cent on the other. This category has experienced only negligible income growth
compared to the other groups. These developments constitute the most comprehensive redistribution
of income and wealth since the Industrial Revolution (Milanovic 2012: 13). Although this picture is
very broad and not specific for regions or countries, some implications for the politics within
national welfare states can scarcely be overlooked. Some of the political manifestations of these
developments emerge as threats perceived to emanate from migration and the potential or actual loss
of jobs, manifested in political insecurity expressed in the rise of xenophobic populism. Such trends
are, in various degrees, common to both Europe and the rest of the OECD world.
Second, the policies around (re)distribution of income and wealth have also changed. The
developments just sketched have contributed to policies which moved from class conflict to rent-
seeking. All forms of production have been subjected to criteria of rationality and profitability
through the decrease of national regulatory mechanisms such as tariffs, labour protection, nationally
exclusive ownership rules, and an opening-up to global competition in investment and trade, although
these trends are currently counteracted partly by growing protectionist economic policies. Among
other tendencies, a national ‘competition state’ has emerged (Cerny 1997). This tendency, which
intensifies capital concentration through measures such as mergers, is an expression of an extreme
form of market liberalization and has sometimes been called neo-liberalism, whose outcome has been
policies and ideological tenets aimed at reducing state expenditures and state regulation more
generally, and decreasing overall market regulation (e.g. by privatization of various economic
sectors). In an era of low economic growth in the West (below global GDP growth rates, and much
below those of China and India), Europe, in particular, has seen an expansion of austerity politics.
Against this background a common feature with respect to cross-border traffic has been the
demand for docile and sometimes cheaper migrant labour, combined with the construction not only of
a category of highly skilled immigrants but also of a subordinate status for migrant workers to ensure
that they take jobs rejected by nationals of the destination countries (Castles 2010). For those
industries not relocating abroad this in turn has increased the demand for labour migrants. Sectors
such as services, construction, and agriculture fall into this category. These developments are not a
short-term tendency but a decades-long development dating from the late 1970s, when the ‘golden
years’ of the Keynesian welfare state declined and rates of high economic growth have subsequently,
for the most part, subsided in the global North (cf. Wallerstein et al. 2013). Against this background,
one of the politically relevant factors contributing to discontent among voters has been the perception
that politics and politicians are too weak to protect citizens from the threats of globalization. This
insight can also be applied to immigration as a complex political arena. The main element is
simplification: migration is constituted as an overarching ‘meta-issue’ (Faist 1994) related to the
threats of globalization, for example in unemployment and housing scarcities, but also in threats to
non-material goods, such as (national) identity, whose homogeneity is perceived to be endangered by
increasing cultural heterogeneities in the wake of immigration.
We can usefully distinguish four master socio-political processes in the economic and cultural
realms, and their associated tensions (Table 8.1). In the economic realm, a tension exists between
market liberalization through a flexible workforce on the one hand, and welfare state regulation and
de-commodification via social rights on the other. In essence, this means the juxtaposition of migrants
as human capital vs. workers (including migrants) as bearers of social rights. In terms of the state, we
could say that it is the competition state vs. the (national) welfare state which is predicated on social
rights for its members. The welfare state not only calls for relatively restrictive immigration policies
and is exclusionary toward non-citizens (Chapter 2) but also has more inclusive features. Certain
social rights are available also to non-citizens, long-term residents with a secure residence status;
fewer social rights are available to temporary migrants, and very few rights to irregular migrants (for
more fine-grained distinctions, see e.g. Sainsbury 2006). These rights serve to favour de-
commodification but above all favour regulated commodification, that is, work is regulated and
immigrant workers tend to have access to (selected) social rights. More importantly, social rights in
the welfare state are nowadays often conceived as human rights, a development that has been part of
the rights revolution. For example, ILO conceives labour and social rights as part of overarching
human rights (Kott and Droux 2013; see also Chapter 4).
Table 8.1. Two major tensions: the welfare and the liberal paradox

Migration policies Wanted/welcome Expansive Restrictive

Economically wanted and Market liberalization:
recognized: Migrants as human capital
Welfare paradox
Competition state
Socio-culturally welcome and Cultural Pluralism (rights
recognized: revolution):
Liberal paradox Human rights and cultural rights
for minorities
Liberal state of law
(De-)commodification:
Restrictive admission policies; inclusive integration
policies
Welfare state
Securitization:
Citizens sharing a way of life and norms; migrants
as risk and threat
National democratic state

A caveat has to be added: market liberalization and individual (social) rights are not only
antonymous but also go together to a certain degree. For example, anti-discrimination policies help to
mobilize what economists have called human capital of individuals belonging to groups, such as
women and racialized minorities, excluded until a couple of decades ago from certain segments of the
formal labour market. The issue raised by cross-border migration is that social rights as human rights
limit profit-seeking capital and are applicable not just to citizens but also to non-citizen residents (see
Chapter 3 on the trade-off between the level of rights and the numbers of migrants). In sum, individual
rights go along with market liberalization in that they strengthen the autonomy of the individual
worker with respect to discrimination. Yet market liberalization in the guise of deregulation also
challenges human rights, for example, when migrants work in substandard conditions, as evidenced,
for instance, in the prevalence of ‘3D’ jobs for migrants: dirty, dangerous, difficult, and precarious
positions (cf. Standing 2011: chapter 4). In a nutshell, the tension between market liberalization and
social rights addresses the welfare paradox: there is tension between the national state as a
competition state on the one hand and a welfare state on the other. From the point of view of the
competition state immigration policy should be quite liberal, whereas it should be more restrictive
from a welfare state perspective. From a human rights perspective those immigrants admitted to
destination countries should have access to at least basic social rights.
As to the cultural realm, there is tension between an expansion of cultural rights including
multiculturalism on the one hand, and the politics of national unity combined with democratic politics
on the other. In terms of the state, we could say that tension exists between the rule of law and the
national and democratic state. This is the liberal paradox: on the one hand, states have undertaken
obligations to honour human rights conventions (e.g. the UNHCR 1951 Refugee Convention and
accompanying stipulations such as the 1969 New York Protocol), and also grant the extension of
fundamental rights even to non-citizen populations on their territory. On the other hand, liberal
democracies seek to restrict the large-scale entry of forced migrants because of—among other
reasons—security concerns and issues around cultural conflicts, such as perceived threats to a
homogeneous understanding of national identity. In contrast to the first realm, this is not about social
rights but cultural and political rights. In other words, the rule of law favours cultural pluralism and
migrants are perceived either as a beacon of diversity or multiculturalism, sometimes even with the
potential to revitalize ageing and culturally homogeneous societies, or as a threat to well-established
collective identities in the frames of securitization. The general process of securitization refers, first,
to issues of external and internal security (borders) and, second, to the welfare state. One of the
results of closure toward the outside world and exclusion of non-members is thus aptly called
welfare nationalism. The perception of migration as a threat is often based on the assumption that
ethno-national homogeneity indeed exists and needs to be protected (Medrano and Koenig 2005). One
of the most important contemporary expressions of such culturalization and racialization in Europe
has been right-wing xenophobic populism. Anti-immigration feelings among the dominant
population’s electorates have been fostered and exploited by parties mobilizing tensions related to
growing inequalities not only in material wealth but also in power between ‘the elites’ and ‘the
people’. Overall, anti-immigrant and more broadly anti-minority populism is related not only to
migration but also to the loss of state legitimacy and, economically, nationalist-protectionist trade and
currency policies (Kriesi et al. 2006). Yet migration serves as a very visible key area in this kind of
contentious politics.
Market liberalization and securitization are intricately interrelated. While the former provides for
class-based distinctions, the latter, in its various guises, works to exclude certain categories based on
control of borders, and to culturalize certain class segments in the case of migration—who are then
perceived as a threat to resources and/or identities. The two sets of processes are also linked to
countervailing processes through the concept of rights. In the politico-economic realm, it is above all
social rights which act as a corrective to excessive commodification of labour, providing for a
modicum of redistribution and regulation. Moreover, for migrants, the notion of social rights as human
rights is what matters above all. The idea of rights is also present in the politico-cultural realm,
providing for recognition: cultural and political rights are meant to provide recognition to groups
hitherto excluded from public life, especially but not only in the political arena. The master processes
of market liberalization and securitization, on the one hand, and the rights revolution on the other, are
connected to different strands of statehood. The first set of master processes or tensions connects
market liberalization to the competition state and de-commodification to the welfare state; the second
set of master processes connects securitization to the national and democratic territorial state and
cultural pluralism to the rule of law.
This setup of structural tensions also has implications for agency in immigration politics. It is
therefore useful to continue this exercise in types and assign quasi-ideal actor positions (Table 8.2).
As to the welfare paradox of political economy, it is usually business entrepreneurs and their
associations who argue for expansive labour immigration policies, although this varies depending on
the specific sector. A section of employers who pushed for open immigration policies in the 1960s
and were largely successful in doing so are no longer lobbying to the same extent. This change was
caused by the export of mass production industries away from the (post-)industrial core countries and
regions in the global North to production sites in the global South where labour is cheaper and more
docile, a process ongoing since the 1970s. Not surprisingly, the employers who relocated production
were no longer interested in pushing for open labour immigration. This segment of employers has
been replaced by those in high-tech industries and services. Since the 2010s an alleged scarcity of
qualified workers in these latter sectors has resulted in yet another turnaround to a push for more open
policies (Kocharov 2011). In a related way, the demographic trend of a rapidly ageing population and
a ‘surplus’ of labour in emigration regions have led to calls for more labour migrants. More
restrictive positions were usually taken by unions. Since the 1960s, however, this trench line in
politics has become less and less visible because most immigration states have engaged in rather
restrictive labour immigration policies, especially towards those categorized as low-skilled workers.
In this context labour unions, more than before, have emphasized the integration of migrant workers
on equal terms into their organizational structure.
Table 8.2. Actors in immigration policy

Immigration policy Wanted/welcome Expansive Restrictive

Economically wanted: Entrepreneurs Labour unions
Welfare paradox Competition state Welfare state
Socio-culturally welcome and recognized: Proponents of cultural diversity Cultural conservatives, globalization sceptics
Liberal paradox Liberal state of law Democratic state, security state

As to the liberal paradox of political culture, political conflicts have become more visible over
time, not surprisingly because there is usually a progression from a focus on economic skills and
costs/benefits to socio-cultural concerns in immigration processes (Piore 1979). Typically, the
proponents of cultural diversity, be they multiculturalists in the past or partisans of diversity
management more recently, do not necessarily object to more expansive immigration which is seen to
contribute to innovation and to pluralism, reflecting the high cultural diversity of modern society even
without massive immigration. On the other side we not only find cultural conservatives but also those
who see migration and migrants as part of the threat posed by globalization, be they those who
perceive themselves as economically losing or those who fear that well-entrenched forms of life have
come under question.
The interlocking master processes and the basic yet adaptable preferences of various collective
actors provide for a dynamic which is driving the politics of inequalities and integration. A rights-
based perspective constantly pushes norms of equality in the form of entitlements and needs to the
forefront with respect to inequalities arising from commodification and social protection, but also
political participation and recognition; hence the perpetual politicization of perceived inequalities in
immigration contexts. The perspective matters: whereas norms of equality derived from human rights
are mustered mainly by those supporting the cause of migrants, those who fear migrants as
competitors and unwelcome intruders seek to uphold citizenship rights exclusively for the dominant
national group.
The national welfare state is key and plays an inherently ambiguous role through its specific forms
of social closure. On the one hand, it is a corrective to market liberalization (and sometimes, perhaps,
in opposition to it) in that it enables citizens and (permanent) resident migrants through provision of a
modicum of social rights. On the other hand, it is an institution which is exclusive vis-à-vis migrants
from a national point of view: only full members have all rights. Furthermore, migration restrictions
and limitations on rights for migrants are sometimes legitimized with the idea that meaningful
redistribution and regulation of social provisions can only occur in a nationally bounded unit and not
across the whole world (cf. Walzer 1983: 65; see also Chapter 4). The welfare state thus embodies
the national state and citizenship principles, ensuring equality among citizens in bounded political
communities but also upholding fundamental inequalities between citizens and non-citizens,
especially those abroad, and, to a certain extent, also non-citizens in the territory of the national
welfare state. Nonetheless, the notion of social rights as human rights makes for somewhat more
inclusionary immigration policies; not so much with respect to admission but regarding the integration
of migrants in immigration countries. Since the general processes refer to both exclusionary and
inclusionary societal processes, for both migrants and non-migrants in immigration countries, it is
necessary to detail the mechanisms and practices making up the master processes.

Market Liberalization and De-Commodification

Market liberalization also signals a transformation in the ways welfare states have engaged in the
commodification and de-commodification of migrant labour. There has been a transition from
‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie 1982) with a still-expanding welfare state in the 1960s and 1970s,
which enabled economic openness with domestic social rights for citizens, to a more market-liberal
way of regulating, in the 1980s and after, which included mixes of cutbacks but also expansion (e.g.
Borchert 1995). In general, during the post-Second World War climax of the European welfare state
up until the early 1970s, a pro-inclusion social policy stance prevailed in most European regimes. Yet
such an active social policy depended on strong social closure toward the outside world in the sphere
of labour. Far from being open economically, the national labour markets were highly protected from
outside competition. In this situation, continental welfare states in Europe granted social rights to
migrant workers primarily to make sure they would not underbid native workers. Germany
represented a typical case in that the labour unions assented to guest-worker recruitment once it was
clear that they did not formally underbid native workers (Dohse 1981). Labour immigration reached a
peak in the 1960s, followed by processes of family reunification thereafter. Asylum seekers started to
arrive in higher numbers from the late 1970s onwards, reaching a peak first in 1992 as part of the
successor wars around Yugoslavia, and again in 2015 in the midst of wars in the Middle East. Up
until the 1990s, many legal or legalized migrants could achieve denizen status—having most of the
social rights citizens enjoyed, depending on the country and legal category of entry. It was not only
legal citizenship but family (re)unification, residence (human rights), and regular employment (social
rights) that constituted the basis of social citizenship for denizens in Germany and countries such as
the Netherlands, France, and the UK (Dörr and Faist 1997).
Market liberalization in the context of the welfare paradox of open economies and closed welfare
states, has implied a move toward market-oriented citizenship through the master mechanism of
efficiency-oriented individualization. During the heydays of the welfare state the tension could be
managed by both maintaining relatively open economies for goods and recruiting workers. Following
the idea of embedded liberalism, it could be argued that more regulated commodification of labour
and de-commodification in terms of increasing social rights were something of a precondition for
open economies. Vice versa, the gradual deregulation of selected rules could signal a declining
willingness to accept open economic borders, based on the perception that costs are borne by
workers in the global North. This trend is clearly visible in the selection and admission of migrants
and the rights associated with membership: migrants selected along economic criteria, for example
the highly skilled, are thought to make for full members in the future (Bauder 2006). Prioritizing
economic efficiency as a basis for citizenship indicates a changing understanding of membership.
This hunch is also borne out by a focus of states on labour market activation policies in combination
with education policies. These tendencies can be seen as an element of a world cultural phenomenon:
modern states adapt to what appear to be rational norms of regulating public life (Chapters 4 and 7).
We see an increasing emphasis on human capital when admitting migrants. Increasingly, OECD
countries have implemented selection schemes based on the amount of human capital provided by
potential migrants. The schemes range from a points-based system as practised, for example, in
Canada until recently, which admits migrants based on criteria such as academic degree, language
skills, and age, to more employer-based schemes which demand from the applicant a job offer from a
company before admission. Human capital selection systems have spread in European immigration
laws. These rules favour young and highly skilled immigrants (Boucher and Cerna 2014). In Germany,
the introduction of such schemes in the wake of the in-migration law (Zuwanderungsgesetz, 2004)
has indicated a partial shift of emphasis to (high-) skilled labour migration, where economically
desirable newcomers, as in the guest-worker programme and other countries’ colonial labour
schemes of the 1950s and 1960s, are no longer supposed to be dominantly situated in the lowest
socio-economic strata of societies. Germany introduced the Green Card Initiative (2000), to be
followed by EU rules implemented into national law, such as the so-called Blue Card (2009), another
way of privileged hiring and admission of the category called highly skilled (cf. Hanganu and Heß
2016). In short, the situation in labour migration has gone from producing sub-stratification to
complementing super-stratification (Chapter 5). Looking at immigration policies in comparative
perspective, it is noticeable that the admission regulations for the highly skilled have been simplified,
whereas those for the low-skilled have become more cumbersome (Beine et al. 2016). Overall, the
diversity of legal statuses, of ‘outsider’ status in particular, has increased, creating an ever more
differentiated hierarchy of ‘civic stratification’ among migrants (Morris 2002).
Human capital selection means that migrants are chosen along individual characteristics, such as
educational and occupational qualifications and language skills, and not along group characteristics
which do not correspond to liberal criteria, such as race, ethnicity, or religion. It is intended that these
individual characteristics privilege highly skilled migrants. The admission schemes are based on the
premise of specific skills as a prerequisite for admission and, implicitly, successful social
integration. In sum, migrants have come to be evaluated almost exclusively as bearers of human
capital. The latter is even seen as a proxy for the success of cultural integration. It is by connecting
class and culture in this way that national states have reinvented themselves as competition states.
Moving from selection schemes to rights available to immigrants, it seems that opportunities for
achieving legal equality for resident migrants, such as the possibility of acquiring citizenship, have
improved. Citizenship rules have been liberalized. For example, some European countries have
complemented ius sanguinis (blood principle, parental lineage) with ius soli (territorial principle,
birthright) laws for persons born in the country, reduced the time of residence required for
application for citizenship, or have become tolerant toward dual citizenship, which is a prime
instance of transnational citizenship. Germany, in particular, in stark contrast to North America and
the UK, has experienced major debates over ethno-national understandings of nationhood and civic-
national understandings of political membership. But this debate is largely over since ‘we all are
republican now’ (Faist 2007), that is, more and more states in Europe have complemented the ius
sanguinis principles—to be found in practically all states—with ius soli and somewhat more liberal
ius domicilii (rights based on locus of regular residence) regulations (Vink 2012). What is striking
for the transnationalized social question is a concomitant market liberalization of citizenship in this
development: access to legal citizenship focuses on individual skills and the self-responsible
individual who possesses or is eager to learn competences necessary to integrate in a political
community. This stands in striking contrast to principles of collective reciprocity, solidarity, and trust,
or some sort of ethnic belonging. It is the liberal individual who is wanted for full membership.2
Despite its global and cosmopolitan appearance and the focus on individual heterogeneities such
as qualifications and education, market liberalization in OECD welfare states displays economically
nationalist tendencies. Based on the foregoing analysis in Part II of this book, the main inequality-
producing mechanism is class-based ranking of diverse migrant categories. Thus the main social
mechanism operative here is hierarchization, not only through legal means but also discursively. The
most obvious and rather crude one is the semantic dichotomy between mobiles and migrants (Faist
2013): officially, intra-EU migrants are considered mobiles and, unofficially, so also are persons
from other high-status countries such as the USA and Japan. The mobiles are considered beneficial
for economic efficiency and include categories such as international students, posted managers,
successful entrepreneurs, elite athletes, top scientists, and world-class artists. The often neglected
irony is that mobiles are also the ones more likely to be mobile across borders again: mobility breeds
mobility, immobility breeds immobility (Faist 2000: chapter 3). Premises such as docility and social
proximity abound: the highly skilled are not only those who are regarded as economically the most
efficient but are also those thought to comply with the immigration country’s law and traditions, and
who are thus considered as prospective members. By contrast, regular labour migrants, that is, those
hailing from outside the EU or from some of the new accession countries, such as Romania or
Bulgaria, are often considered as part of a social problem and in need of assisted social integration.
They include, for example, low-skilled labour migrants, and the majority of refugees and asylum
seekers. These semantic distinctions have material repercussions and consequences (see Chapters 5
and 6). The social constitution of low-skilled and high-skilled workers is part of usually on-going
struggles around classifications. Such categorizations are key elements by which social positions and
relations between actors are (re)produced, and categorizations are part of symbolic struggles
(Bourdieu 1998a). We may surmise that the importance of this way of handling class contributes to
reproducing social inequalities, that is, slotting individuals in destination states according to their
social position in the country of origin. In general, there is evidence that selected, positively
evaluated, migrant groups, are not seen to need integration efforts, while negatively evaluated migrant
groups are perceived to be in need of assimilation (Montreuil and Bourhis 2001).
The reproduction of class-based inequalities does not happen only through market-liberal
immigration and citizenship policies but also through regular policies and institutions of the welfare
state applying to all residents. Take the case of schooling: disparities between second-generation
migrant and native youths have remained considerable. This is true particularly in the Bismarckian
welfare regimes of Continental Europe with their educational systems based on early tracking and the
limited participation of these migrants in early education childcare (Borgna 2016; Söhn 2014). One
striking example is comparative test results (e.g. Programme for International Student Assessment)
which clearly suggest that the school system matters, not only specific immigrant integration policies.
Otherwise, it would be hard to account for the persistent findings that the same ethnic group fares
better or worse in one European country than in another (Crul and Mollenkopf 2012).
There have been tendencies reinforcing market liberalization by way of Europeanization. Market
liberalization in the EU has been in tune with individualization and individual rights. A prime
example is the push toward anti-discrimination policies from the EU level downward (except the
UK). The rationale for this move has been a thickening of (labour) market integration. As a
consequence, the supranational regulation of migration moved to the area of free movement, away
from justice and home affairs (Ette 2017). The new social project in Europe favours a citizenship
model that privileges individuals as bearers of human capital and draws a close link between work,
economic productivity, and social justice (Somers 2008). This means that the individual in the market
sphere enjoys the imaginary social contract with a national state only if he or she contributes to the
polity. In most liberal democratic states, the argument draws on the costs of migrants for social
welfare expenditures. Immigration is wanted and welcome if it is not a burden to the social welfare
system and contributes instead to productivity and economic growth.
Human capital selection schemes and citizenship are intricately related. The new mobile
cosmopolitans, mainly highly skilled, young urban populations, are recognized as a distinct type of
migrant: ‘Eurostars’, for example, are young persons who are mobile within the EU (Favell 2008).
Their migration intentions are often temporary or even circular, as opposed to migrants who establish
long-term or permanent links to their destination countries. Acquisition of the citizenship of the
immigration country has become legally less important for internationally mobile, highly skilled
migrants—including those from third countries—who are wanted and welcome, and who do not plan
to stay in the destination country for an extended period. Yet for migrants from poorer countries,
acquiring the citizenship of richer countries remains important, for example, in order to compensate
for other lacking resources. A main benefit of the immigration country’s citizenship, and implicitly
dual citizenship, is the ability to travel with fewer restrictions, such as the need for a visa. This is
further evidence of the prime importance of location and citizenship for life chances.
There is a claim that opposition to migration is sometimes based on the negative effects
immigration allegedly has on the welfare state in the EU in general and Germany in particular. While
it is possible that such effects have occurred on the micro-economic level, there is little evidence
about such claims on a macro-economic scale. In 2004, the EU admitted ten new countries, and wages
in these countries were generally well below the levels in the existing member countries. Citizens of
these newly admitted countries were subsequently free to take jobs anywhere in the EU, and many did
so. The real wage effects have been small, and the gains from open borders are large (Kennan 2017).
With respect to more recent inflows of refugees, the situation is similar. More than two million
refugees made their way to Europe between 2014 and 2015, with over one million arriving in
Germany alone. Estimates suggest that migrants have not displaced native workers but have struggled
to find gainful employment (Gehrsitz and Ungerer 2017). Countries that experience a larger influx see
neither more nor less support for the main anti-immigrant party than countries that experience small
migrant inflows. However, another correlation holds steadfast: concerns about free movement are
greatest in countries that combine flexibilized labour markets with a relatively non-contributory
welfare state, such as the UK (Ruhs 2015).

How Social Rights as Human Rights Advance Claims-Making

Increasing liberalization of access to citizenship in general and rights for resident migrants in
particular is part of a shift from ethnic to civic nationalism mentioned earlier. Moreover, almost half
of all states around the world now tolerate some form of dual citizenship. It is apparent that the rights
revolution (Ignatieff 2007) underway since the 1960s has found its way into legislation regulating
access to citizenship as full membership and access of non-citizen residents to social, civil, and
political rights as partial membership, yet excluding irregular migrants. The rights revolution has also
added to social rights claims-making as part of de-commodification of migrant labour. This
revolution can be discerned very clearly in the USA in the wake of the civil rights movement, and in
Europe somewhat later in the process of Europeanization in general, and EU anti-discrimination
legislation from the top down to individual member states in particular. Both in the USA and in
Europe, since the 1960s and 1970s, courts have pushed for the individual rights of legally resident
non-citizens. This trend has manifested in what has sometimes been called post-national citizenship
or, more appropriately, post-national membership (Soysal 1994). In past decades, migrants’ political
mobilization and advocacy on behalf of migrants have increasingly relied on discourses of human
rights and political equality more generally. This has also been true for the processes of de-
commodification, such as the mobilization among undocumented migrants with an irregular residence
and/or work status (Bassel 2014). For example, irregular migrants have insisted, while mobilizing
across Europe, that they have contributed to the national economy of their country of work and
residence (Chimienti 2011). To trace the mechanisms guiding mobilization of migrants against
perceived inequalities it is necessary to look at their resources and the responses of the dominant
groups.
There are three main mechanisms furthering claims of socio-economic equality for immigrants:
redistribution, catching up, and inclusion.
First, positive rights often demand redistribution through taxes. Intervention in schooling, such as
the provision of comprehensive schools or day-long instruction, requires additional resources. These
universal policies are most often blind to ethnicity or skin colour. Comprehensive high schools, in
particular, are favourable to more disadvantaged children from immigrant families (e.g. Stanat and
Christensen 2006).
The second general mechanism advancing equality is catching up. Again, in this case we need to
consider not only official public policies, such as affirmative action, but also trust networks, such as
professional ties and cliques. On the policy level, anti-discrimination rules explicitly take
heterogeneities such as gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation as a point of departure. The
basic idea is that there has been a historical injustice based on exclusion along such heterogeneities
which calls for remedial action, and that there is empirical evidence that (institutional) discrimination
along the lines of such heterogeneities is still prevalent. The idea of catching up, when promoted in a
diluted form such as the EU directive dealing with anti-discrimination (Academy of European Law
2012), is not fiercely contested in public debates. It is implemented into national law and often
upheld by the respective courts. Even so, a caveat needs to be added. There is wide latitude in
implementing this EU directive and corresponding national legislation, and questions revolve around
whether such legal instruments advance the goal of anti-discrimination effectively. In addition to
public policies, trust networks are decisive for less-represented categories in catching up with
established and dominant ones (Chapter 5).
Third, there is the general mechanism of inclusion which enables migrants to acquire and seize
upon social and political rights. A prime example is the liberalization of citizenship acquisition, such
as the reduction of the required waiting period or toleration of dual citizenship. Yet even migrants not
fully included may strive to overcome what they consider injustices. For example, labour migrants in
Germany engaged in a series of wildcat strikes in 1973 in order to improve their working conditions
(M. Miller 1982). We also find political claims-making among undocumented migrants (Chapter 7). It
is in this way that migrants are active claims-makers pushing for social rights.
Overall, the role of individual rights is ambiguous in that market liberalization is furthered but so
are the manifold claims against its negative effects. Individual rights undergird the activation policy
in the fields of employment and education (Roche and van Berkel 1997). In doing so they are
compatible with the push for a stronger consideration of human capital in selecting, admitting, and
integrating migrants. But, ideally, human rights in the form of social rights also guard and protect
against the negative consequences of the commodification of labour, and legitimize mobilization
against the violation of social rights. The context in which the importance of human rights plays out
has changed over the past decades. European integration has meant a thickening of (labour) market
integration, contributing to the activation of labour. The latter has been connected to a transformation
of the Keynesian welfare state since the 1980s (Seeleib-Kaiser 2008). In general, instead of de-
commodification through social rights as a trend most visible in the 1960s and 1970s, there has been
a greater emphasis on creating human capital through activating employment policies and—in
Continental Europe—casting education as part of social policies. In contrast, in the Anglo-Saxon
tradition, education has for a long time been conceived of as an integral part of the welfare state. In
this respect, there has been a sort of Continental European convergence with Anglo-Saxon
commodification patterns.
So far, the analysis has focused on migrants as wanted or unwanted from an economic point of
view. It has become clear that migrants have not, however, remained apolitical Homo oeconomicus
by way of abstaining from political claims; hence the need to look at how both migrants and
established groups have, when viewing immigration from an endogenous point of view, gradually
moved beyond a primary focus on economic aspects to include politico-cultural ones as well. We
know that, in general, the supremacy of the economic aspects of established-outsider conflicts is most
pronounced where the balance of power between the contenders is most uneven, that is, tilted strongly
in favour of the established group (Elias 1994 [1965]: xxxi). At the core, tensions and conflicts are
always balance-of-power struggles: dominant groups feel threatened by moves against their
monopolized power resources, against their group charisma, and against their group norms (Elias
1994 [1965]: xxxvii). But before taking a closer look at the politics of striving for equality in the
cultural realm, we need to look at processes of securitization beyond the wanted aspect and move on
to the welcome aspect.

Securitization and Culture in the Plural

While market liberalization and de-commodification serve as a crucial basis for class distinctions, or
at least reinforces them, cultural pluralism and securitization are strongly shaped by cultural
distinctions of collectives. Over the past few decades, the grounds for the legitimization of
inequalities have shifted. Now, not only are ascriptive traits taken as a point of departure, as in
outright racism, but also the alleged cultural dispositions of immigrants or the lack thereof. An
important trope is that migrants are not liberal, that is, allegedly they do not master the tenets of
modernity (Triadafilopoulos, Adamson, and Zolberg 2011). In other words, securitization emphasizes
cultural differences in order to construct migration as a threat. Although market liberalization
advocates more open borders and securitization reinforces restrictive policies, the latter can be
directly linked to the former. The main point is that market liberalization erodes trust among citizens
—a claim advanced by thinkers as diverse as Émile Durkheim (1964a [1893]) and Karl Polanyi
(2001 [1944]), a view contradicting Friedrich von Hayek’s (1976 [1944]) claims. In Polanyi’s
account, labour is a ‘fictitious commodity’ (along with land and money), and the liberal capitalism of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (which induced a great transformation of the socio-economic
and political order), has elicited counter-movements. The question is whether we live on the verge of
a ‘second great transformation’ (Burawoy 2000). Briefly put, securitization and, by implication, anti-
immigrant populism, however supportive of market liberalization, have been marketed as
counterweights to the fears brought up by the unbridled commodification of labour.
In essence, securitization is a result of categorizations along the lines of ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Categorizations such as ‘we’ and ‘other’ imply processes of ‘othering’ which tend to consist of three
more specific social mechanisms. First, there is a sort of dichotomization: the other group is entirely
different from us. Second, there is homogenization of another group by which all members are held to
have equal characteristics. Third, there is hierarchization: the other group is definitely socially below
one’s own.
In its most basic sense, securitization refers to the overall process of turning a policy issue such as
drug trafficking or cross-border migration into a security issue. It is a move to construct an
intersubjective understanding that holds something as an existential threat and calls for exceptional
measures beyond the routines of everyday politics (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998). The term
concerns a perception of a threat to the ability of a nationally bound society to maintain and reproduce
itself. Threats perceived in the context of immigration may be physical and material—such as job
competition with migrants—but also identity-based—such as the fear of ‘foreign takeover’ by distant
cultures.
The first and—from the vantage point of national states—external aspect of securitization means
that the threat constitutes an affair to be dealt with by security organizations, such as the
externalization of migration control or increased border controls in the wake of terrorist attacks. As
to the former, externalization, it stands to reason that the individual rights revolution has widened the
liberal gap: while the politics allegedly demands closure, human and civil rights in the wake of the
rights revolution call for stable rights even for those migrants who are not (yet) citizens, such as
permanent residents, although to a much lesser extent for undocumented migrants. At the same time,
the liberal paradox is circumvented both by externalized migration control and by the internalization
of border control. As to the latter, securitization is ‘an attempt at insecuritization of daily life by the
security professionals and an increase in the strengths of police potential for action’ (Bigo 2001:
121). The manifest function is to show willingness to act decisively. By contrast, the latent function is
to further the process of securitization itself. The crucial move is to shift problems which the state
cannot adequately solve to problems which can be successfully addressed (Faist 2005). This aspect
concerns security in the classical form of national security. The territorially organized national state
treats migrants, especially in the context of admission, as objects necessitating the strict application
of standards of security. This goes as far as advancing the limits of control internally as well as
externally through embassies and consulates outside the national state territory, thus constituting a sort
of remote control (Chapter 7).
The second and internalizing aspect of securitization refers to both economic competition and to
culturalization, that is, the treatment of ‘other’ cultures as a threat. As to economic competition,
migrants are sometimes perceived as a threat to the welfare state by way of competition for jobs,
housing, and social services, even though very few people migrate for the purpose of obtaining
welfare in the country of destination (Giulietti 2014). In this way, migrants are publicly constituted as
a homogeneous bloc, and a dichotomy of migrants vs. non-migrants is established.
These issues around economic competition and social protection are inextricably interwoven with
cultural concerns. Underlying securitization of migration is a perception of a loss of control over
managing one’s own affairs, be that loss of national, collective, or individual autonomy, in what is
called globalization—the perception of the negative and positive impacts of ever-increasing
interactions across national borders. Equally important, securitization concerns one of the main
results of the onslaught of market-fundamentalist policies, namely an increased perception that
individuals are themselves responsible for the position they find themselves in (Soysal 2012).
Migration and migrants are partly blamed because they are visible signs of globalization and thus
visible threats to the way of life. Ultimately, securitization concerns the complex interplay of two
essential questions for national welfare states, namely, ‘who should benefit?’ and ‘who are we?’ The
two questions are intricately related in that norms of reciprocity and solidarity in welfare states
essentially depend upon who is included in the collective ‘we’. Redistribution in welfare states is
largely paid for by the middle class, which is at the same time its main beneficiary (Wilensky 1974).
Therefore, it matters very much who is to be counted among the welfare collective.
Mobilization against immigration in democratic welfare states is sometimes connected in a
populist manner to anti-elite mobilization in asking the question: why would we share our resources
with others if there is not enough for ourselves? In this way, immigration is cast as a problem of
moral hazard because migrants are seen as exploiting the welfare state. This example suggests that
two axes overlap in nationalist-populist mobilization involving immigrants. The first is a vertical
mobilization of distrust of elites who allegedly are not able to weather the storms of globalization.
The second involves horizontal mobilization against those seen as incarnations of the threat posed by
globalization to all aspects of security, namely immigrants who are homogenized and dichotomized
vis-à-vis the dominant groups. In this case vertical mobilization reinforces horizontal mobilization.
While the latter is a regular part of migration processes, it is reinforced by anti-elite discourse. Also,
while it may be difficult to hold economic elites responsible, not least because of their political
influence, certain migrant groups may serve as convenient scapegoats.
There is evidence that there is not only a perception of economic but also cultural and thus
collective identity threat which is especially resonant with disenchanted middle-class voters (e.g.
Geiges, Marg, and Walter 2015) and with cultural nationalists who have not necessarily been among
the economic losers of globalization (Bergmann, Diermeier, and Niehues 2017). There is a strong link
between membership and a sense of belonging and access to rights, a link exploited by right-wing and
extremist parties to win over culturally conservative voters. For example, immigrants, including
refugees, are perceived as economic and/or cultural competitors by those who express a more
authoritarian mindset and subsequently a voting preference for right-wing parties (Dolmas and
Huffman 2004). This also applies to those who express a preference for the German Alternative für
Deutschland, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, or the Front National in France. The opposition to
migration has usually managed to get mass media attention by dramatizing and emotionalizing the
effects of migration—a phenomenon called the fringe effect (Bail 2012).
The mechanism of hierarchization is involved, not only with respect to migrants vs. natives but
also relating to migrants themselves: often, though not exclusively, it has been the lower-class
segments among immigrants who have been culturalized since the 1970s; for example, it is claimed
that they do not integrate and are still culturally backward (on sexuality and Islam, see Mepschen,
Duyvendak, and Tonkens 2010). This should not be taken to mean that only lower-class migrants are
culturalized. One may take as an example German migrants in Switzerland, most of whom would be
classified as high-skilled. In this case, it is ethnicity (i.e. nationality (Germanness)) which is
perceived as threatening. Nonetheless, the culturalization of high-skilled migrants is currently not as
widespread as that of lower-class migrants.
What is driving the contention around cultural heterogeneity and places it at the forefront of the
politics of immigration is the antinomy of difference in cultural pluralism or multiculturalism, on the
one hand, and of similarity or even sameness in securitization, on the other. It is important to note that
this antinomy goes far beyond the idea of cultural similarity in assimilation, in that securitization
easily turns into xenophobia. The manifest function of securitization as culturalization could be that
citizens in an immigration country can self-identify, in a period in which the perception of economic
and social threats has increased, by using another group as an instrument of comparison. Moreover,
culturalization could deflect conflicts between voters and politico-economic elites toward migrants.
A latent function of culturalization along heterogeneities such as religion could be to compensate for
identities perceived to have been lost (Kivisto 2014).
Securitization has emerged in the field of international relations and international politics, which,
even before 9/11, had begun to highlight more fundamental concerns about altered security issues.
Such issues comprise very different phenomena ranging from international terrorism or ethno-national
strife to environmental degradation, food and energy scarcities, drug trafficking, population growth,
undocumented migration, and organized crime. All of these are discussed in public spheres as having
a transnational aspect (Göktürk, Gramling, and Kaes 2007). It is thus not surprising that the post-Cold
War period has seen efforts to view international migration not only as an important regional and geo-
strategic dynamic with potentially crucial effects upon states and their security, but also as a threat to
the very fabric of national societies, namely national identity. Consider the increasing securitization
of citizenship (Macklin 2014) and public concern about the compatibility of Muslim immigrants with
liberal values post-9/11 (Foner and Simon 2015). The media and public political discourses give rise
to different social perceptions, which divide people hierarchically into categories of economically
wanted or unwanted, and culturally welcome or not welcome. One of the results is the emergence of
conceptions and stereotypes of migrant groups conforming to or violating values—seeing certain
groups, for example, as criminal, promiscuous, or lazy (Staerklé 2009). Once migrants are conceived
in the mind of the public as being potential terrorists, they are outside the realm of moral
responsibility (see also Chapter 7 on cognitive dissonance). Such a view justifies the exclusion of
complete categories of migrants, such as undocumented migrants.
These processes can be interpreted as an instance of reproducing social inequalities through
symbolic power. Symbolic power simultaneously naturalizes and disguises the power-laden nature of
the most basic, everyday understandings and practices. Symbolic power is the means by which power
relations are legitimized. It is the power to classify. Securitization in the guise of welfare nationalism
constitutes an effort to maintain privileges on the part of established groups. Struggles over
classification are fundamentally about individual and group identity, and privileges.
 Historically, national states have used immigration as a tool in fostering a particular national
identity (Zolberg 2006), and immigrant integration policies and debates have served to answer the
question, ‘who are we?’ This implies that migration politics is mainly based on ascriptive
heterogeneities, created and reproduced by symbolic power. From the vantage point of the dominant
societal groups (‘us’), not all others are perceived in the same way. In Europe in general and in
Germany in particular, the securitization of culture has focused on religion and here above all on the
(in)compatibility of Islam with core political norms, such as democracy, and cultural norms, such as
gender equality. By contrast, in the USA, the legal status of migrants (i.e. regular vs. irregular) and the
category of race have crystallized among the most important heterogeneities (Foner and Simon 2015:
5–13). Race, in particular, is interesting because the ‘racial frame’ has lost relevance in immigration
policies and thus in the selection of migrants. Officially, the legal frame has gained in importance and
it is colour blind, de jure. De facto, however, the legal frame still marks certain categories of
migrants as not wanted, such as people of colour (Waters and Kasinitz 2015). In this context, it is
important to consider the interactive component of class and culture, and more specifically the
confluence of market liberalization and securitization. For immigrants from certain countries of
origin, such as North Africa or Turkey, there is an overlap of socio-economic position (often inferior)
with religion (Islam), although not all immigrants from the Middle East fall into the category of low-
skilled or disadvantaged. Cultural politics rests on the same foundations as class politics, that is, the
(near) impermeability of boundaries (Wimmer 2013).
One of the most important contemporary expressions of perceptions of competition but also of
culturalization, including racialization, has been xenophobic populism. As welfare chauvinism and
xenophobia have increased across Europe (Rydgren 2008), anti-immigration feelings among the
dominant population’s electorates across Europe have been fostered and exploited by both
mainstream and right-wing populist parties. Overall, populism is related not only to migration but
also to the loss of legitimacy of ruling elites. In this frame, right-wing populist parties exploit
xenophobic sentiments. They also favour other nationalist-protectionist policies, such as the
reintroduction of national currencies (Kriesi et al. 2006). Right-wing populism not only promises to
reduce or even terminate immigration but also to restore the welfare state to its deserving citizens. It
is part of a comprehensive movement aiming to re-nationalize the national welfare state. In other
words, right-wing populism’s appeal is also based on the idea that national homogeneity is a public
good which would be diluted by cultural pluralism. From this vantage point, notions of plurality and
multiculturalism are seen as typical elite phenomena (Hilson 2008). The principal origin of
contention and conflicts is the perception that the ‘other’ in the guise of immigrants is not part of ‘us’
as a community of solidarity upon which national welfare states are built.
The increasing securitization of migration and, above all, the emergence of right-wing populist
politics in particular have also reinforced a cultural politics of homogenizing groups as ethnic or
national groups, both migrants and natives. This is the necessary condition for migration to serve as a
meta-issue, which links a whole range of socio-economic and political ills to immigration and cross-
border movement, for example, unemployment, housing shortages, and terrorism. Populism of right-
wing movements and parties constitutes an anti-system and anti-elite movement with a plebiscitarian
bent (Mény and Surel 2002). Its implicit promotion of immigration as a meta-issue is aimed mainly at
eroding the trust of citizens in the political elite vertically and renewing a sense of national
homogeneity horizontally. It is also closely connected to the rights revolution in that this kind of
populism is partly a response to the transformation of the welfare state which is no longer exclusively
serving the dominant group of citizens but is now also accessible to various categories of immigrants.
 Securitization also affects categories of migrants who are accepted on humanitarian grounds—
those who are sometimes seen as an object of charity. In a securitized world, refugees as a category
signal that the subjects are seen either as victims or sometimes as an internal threat to bodily security,
state security, and social security. This state of affairs reflects their social construction both as an
object of humanitarian intervention in order to help those victimized and as an object of securitization
in order to foster a division of the population. In a way, the confluence of humanitarianism and
securitization has contributed to an ever higher degree of temporariness for forced migrants, given the
overall restrictive policies of most immigration countries around the globe. Over the past two to three
decades, especially since 1989, the legal status of refugees has become ever more temporary
(Chapter 7).
This analysis of the (re)production of social inequalities around migrants as a threat to security in
the frames of securitization does not imply that migrants are simply objects of homogenization,
dichotomization, and hierarchization. Quite to the contrary, any comprehensive understanding of how
the transnationalized social question plays out in national politics needs to also consider migrants as
bearers of rights and as claims-makers. In immigration states, populist responses to cultural pluralism
include, among other things, allegations that rights to religious self-organization and representation in
the public sphere would ultimately end up with Islam soon dominating the European scene. One of its
clearest expressions has been the PEGIDA movement in Germany: Patriotische Europäer gegen die
Islamisierung des Abendlands (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident; Coury
2016). Multicultural demands counteract such right-wing populist rhetoric by inducing governments to
negotiate and, perhaps even more to the point, disciplining Islamic organizations so that they fit into
the religious roster of nationally specific arrangements between religious communities and state
institutions—as has happened in Germany, France, and Sweden (O’Brien 2016).
Cross-border migration is central to the transnationalized social question because the voices of
migrants themselves and of those acting on their behalf are continually present as part of the migration
process, often at a later stage in the migration process when migrants establish themselves as socio-
cultural agents. Obviously, the production of inequalities and the claims to equalities need to be seen
in tandem. Migrant claims-making and corresponding public policies have been part of the rights
revolution, although in some cases they date back much earlier. To take an example, think of the
special rights afforded to national minorities such as Danes and Sorbs in Germany, the Sami in
Finland, Norway, and Sweden, or Germans in Denmark (Schneckener 2004). One of the most
contested fields in Europe has been religion. It has been in this field that claims-making by migrant
associations and the responses by dominant groups have been most visible and contentious.
Multicultural policies show clear results with respect to the political integration of immigrants.
This enabling function of multicultural policies with respect to politics may have the important
consequence of improving the socio-economic and socio-cultural position of the categories covered
by such policies, mostly national minorities and indigenous people, but also, by extension, immigrant
minorities. Empirical evidence comes from the Multiculturalism Policy Index (MCP). The MCP
measures public recognition of and support for immigrant categories in the respective immigration
countries. The measures include: official affirmation of multiculturalism, multicultural content in
school curricula, exemptions from dress codes, toleration of dual citizenship, funding of immigrant
organizations, support of bilingual and mother-tongue instruction, and the existence of an affirmative
action policy for immigrant groups (see also British Council 2005). Note that the MCP thus does not
focus on group rights but on individual rights and support of migrant organizations. In the first decade
of the twenty-first century, the highest overall scores on the MCP were achieved by Australia,
Canada, and Sweden, while the lowest were recorded in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy,
and Switzerland (Trolly 2011). Zeroing in on political participation, it stands to reason that rank in
the MCP makes a difference (see also Winter 2010). For example, the percentage of working-age
immigrants living in the country for at least ten years who had adopted citizenship in 2007 amounted
to 89 per cent in Canada vs. 37 per cent in Germany and 35 per cent in Switzerland. This finding
suggests that full incorporation in the political system differs vastly, most likely with the effect of
differential chances of participating in electoral politics. Also, when considering less conventional
forms of political participation, such as demonstrations and sit-ins, immigrant-origin categories in
countries with higher MCP scores are more likely to engage in non-violent political activities than
those in societies with a more mono-cultural self-understanding. All of this suggests that multicultural
policies, despite their obvious drawbacks such as the ossification of migrant cultures or limits to
freedom of expression within groups that benefit, can fulfil enabling functions which are conducive to
claims-making with respect to both social and cultural rights. This aspect has been most visible in the
religious realm not only because it has been thematized by right-wing populist politics but also
because most multicultural guarantees can be found in this realm (Modood 2007).
There is what one could call a pluralist puzzle: despite the nationalist-populist critique and the
public perception of a backlash against and retreat from immigrant multiculturalism, multicultural
policies, by and large, have not receded in Europe across the board but have persisted and, in many
cases, continue to expand (Banting and Kymlicka 2012; Bloemraad 2011). Across Europe, there is a
sharp divide between the expansion of multicultural policies in the legal realm, on the one hand, and a
much less widespread acceptance of such policies in public opinion, on the other (Hafez 2014). This
is also true with respect to Germany which supports multicultural rights in the field of religion:
Catholic and Protestant Churches as well as the Jewish community enjoy extensive collective rights,
whereas the debate on the inclusion of Islam in the institutional religious landscape is on-going. In
short, while the rhetorical criticism of multiculturalism is ever mounting and multicultural rhetoric is
pushed back by ‘liberal nationalism’ (Levey 2001), existing multicultural policies have not been
reversed in countries such as Sweden and Germany.

Consequences of the Rights Revolution

There are three main mechanisms accounting for the successful multicultural challenge of mono-
culturalization and securitization, namely, de-hierarchization, de-categorization of groups thought to
be homogeneous, and re-categorization along lines which consider pluri-cultural heterogeneities
found in immigrant groups and see migrants as members of specific groups (cf. Hewstone and Swart
2011).
Mobilization around religion, religious freedom, and representation in public life is a prominent
current example of efforts at de-hierarchization on the part of certain immigrant groups. In Germany,
Islamic organizations have vigorously pushed for inclusion in the corporatist structure, with varying
success: some are recognized as religious communities and are allowed, for example, to offer
religious instruction in public schools, while others are not (DIK 2011). And it is not only in the
religious field that de-hierarchization as a social mechanism is very much connected to claims-
making of immigrants. Two classic examples are unionization (Goeke 2014) and the setting up of
political organizations to achieve political empowerment (Pojmann 2008).
The counter-movement to securitization is in some sense an equality-producing re-categorization.
In the present period, the claims of religious groupings of newcomers, mostly Islamic, go beyond
exemption laws toward claiming equal rights (cf. Carol and Koopmans 2013). The latter refer, for
example, to physical exercise in schools from which Muslim girls were exempted. Such exemptions
have been rolled back since 9/11. Interestingly enough, claims for exemptions have been reframed as
claims for equality, the headscarf debate being just one example (Korteweg and Yurdakul 2014). The
re-categorization that has taken place over the past two decades in Europe has meant seeing certain
migrant groups in religious instead of class or ethnic categories, and constitutes a potential de-
hierarchization of religious order. In Germany, for example, large religious communities, such as
Catholic and Protestant Churches, have historically been party to the agreement between state and
Church (Konkordat). Those religious denominations that are acknowledged as public players are
either religious communities or even corporations of public law. This characteristic applies to
Christian Churches and the Jewish community. All of them have far-reaching rights in the socio-
cultural sphere, akin to unions and employer associations in the field of employment regulation. The
latter regulate the setting of wages and working conditions through sector-wide labour contracts on a
relatively autonomous basis. Religious associations recognized as corporations of public law are
entitled to the collection of taxes by the state from registered believers, representation on the boards
of public mass media, and the extension of religious instruction in public schools. Islam in France
constitutes yet another example. True to a laïcist and centralist regime of governing religion, Muslim
organizations have emerged as nationally centralized institutions. Yet instead of upgrading Muslim
religious organizations to the level of established religious communities, there could also be a
collective downgrading. In Sweden, for instance, the Lutheran Church lost its privilege as a Church
representing the state, whereas newcomer associations have been elevated to the status of other
communities (for an overview, see Koenig 2007).
The mechanism of de-hierarchization is particularly important because it reminds us that debates
on cultural pluralism need to look at how both economic redistribution and cultural recognition are
connected to participation in political decision-making. Mobilization around religion, religious
freedom, and representation in public life is a prominent current example of efforts at de-
hierarchization on the part of certain immigrant groups. At the same time, it is important to consider
the overlap of socio-economically disadvantaged categories of immigrants (e.g. from Turkey and
North Africa) with religious ones (Islam). In this way, the class dimension clearly co-structures the
perception of Islam in Europe not simply as culturally distinct but also as related to inferior social
position(s).
While religious differences and social distance matter in most West European immigration
countries, the institutional channels for dealing with such heterogeneities differ. The corporatist
German system sets high hurdles for access of Muslim organizations in public policy, whereas the
British system does not require such an elaborate institutional inclusion process. There is no doubt
that the speed of incorporation of religious communities has been much faster in the Anglo-Saxon
world where the formal/institutional separation of Church and state provide for quicker
accommodation than in corporatist continental systems. Yet, note that even in countries with relatively
high hurdles to overcome, such as Germany, there has been a slow and gradual transition from
state/Church law (Staatskirchenrecht) to constitutional law on religion (Religionsverfassungsrecht)
(Krech 2011). This tendency signals a gradual yet visible retreat from tight legal state-Church
linkages.
Re-categorizing migrant groups can potentially remove hierarchies; the paradox is that these
processes involve mechanisms that simultaneously produce equalities and inequalities, which in turn
can have an impact on integration as incorporation. In removing hierarchies, a process of
essentializing religious difference inadvertently comes into play, feeding into identity politics. The
Deutsche Islam Konferenz (DIK) is a convenient lens through which one may view this process.
Obviously, the inclusion of Muslim organizations refers not only to the legal-political inclusion of
Islamic groups and organizations into the corporatist system, which has been an on-going concern for
state and religious associations and established Churches alike. Through the DIK, religion is co-
constituted as the main axis of immigrant integration politics and policy. The DIK can be considered
as a sort of boot camp to train representatives of Islamic organizations to be part of Germany’s
corporatist political system. It serves as a way to confirm that the organizational tenets of newcomer
religions should be compatible with German corporatist conditions (Tezcan 2012). The focus on
Islam in the context of a specific corporatist mode of religious institutionalization denotes an entire
population of persons, namely those who (allegedly) are Muslims (on other European cases, see
Laurence 2006). As a result, in public debates, the individuals in question are not Muslims who have
a religious identity in addition to their class, gender, or ethnic identity. Rather, their entire collective
identity seems to be defined by religious belonging. It is thus well worth studying the actual effects of
specific interfaces such as the DIK. As it is, there seems to be an interesting confluence of equality-
producing re-categorization of religious communities on the one hand, and a further essentialization of
religious identities on the other. The latter feature is strengthened by the mono-cultural stance of some
Muslim organizations. The question is whether members of the category in question withdraw their
commitment from other boundaries, for example those defined along class or national lines, as they
focus increasingly on allegiance to the boundary defined in religious terms (on heterogeneities
interacting with religion, such as gender, see also Joly and Wadia 2017).
The strong public focus on religion, for example by institutionalizing religious dialogue as
essential for immigrant integration and essentializing immigrants as believers, in this case Muslims,
has contributed to an upward spiral of politicizing immigrant cultures, however unintended, by the
practices of (immigrant) religious associations, nationalist populists, and governments alike. Partly
this is so because religion is an either/or category in much of Western Europe: you are a believer in a
certain faith or you are not. This situation is quite different with respect to other cultural
heterogeneities such as language, which, in an immigration context, function in more additive than
exclusive ways.
Instead of recognizing certain heterogeneities, such as religion, as constitutive of representing
particular groups in public life, re-categorization in conjunction with de-hierarchization aims to get
rid of ascriptive heterogeneities as a basis for exclusion. In essence, it is an effort to make sure that
heterogeneities such as religious belonging or practice should not matter for life chances. Efforts at
de-hierarchization are sometimes pushed forward by the dominant groups. A crucial example is the
use in Germany of the term ‘Persons with a Migration Background’ (PMB), which was intended to
replace the term ‘foreigners’. PMBs are defined by the German Federal Statistical Office as persons
who have immigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949; foreign citizens born in the
Federal Republic of Germany (FRG); and all German citizens born in the FRG with at least one
parent who either immigrated to the FRG after 1949 or were born in Germany as foreign citizens.
PMB is a composite category, not one that respondents can self-identify with. As a close empirical
analysis of parliamentary debates on education between the years 2006 and 2013 indicates, however,
the speakers tended to construct PMB as a ‘homogenized social category’ which conflated language,
class, and belonging (Elrick and Schwartzman 2015: 1539). In short, there are definite limits to
efforts to re-categorize. This is so not only because the very social construction of subordinate
categories of migrants is often imposed by the dominant groups through political debates. There are
also incentives for migrants to organize along group-specific boundaries in order to reap the benefits
of collective representation. Since multicultural policies in Germany exist above all in the religious
field, it is here that politico-cultural struggles are most visible. In this way, group boundaries are
created and reinforced.
When we examine approaches such as diversity management in private and public organizations, it
becomes clear that this approach does not constitute a linear expansion of rights-based claims.
Diversity management approaches are based on resources of individuals (migrants) as used by
organizations. What can also be observed is a trend toward a de-politicized interpretation of
heterogeneities in European public spheres. This newer approach has followed in the wake of a
displacement of multicultural language by a semantic of diversity. It is worth noting that diversity
management is not primarily rights-based but takes the resources of migrants—such as language and
intercultural skills—to help organizations either compete more successfully in markets as private
institutions or serve their clients more effectively as public institutions. Diversity, at least in the
private sector, mobilizes the private resources of minority individuals and looks for their most
efficient allocation for profit- and rent-seeking. Diversity is easily compatible with a market-liberal
approach though it is broader in scope and is not limited to employment-related skills. It is somewhat
different in the public sector, where organizations—in the domain of policing but also in the
education and health sectors—seek more adequate ways of providing services to a clientele which is
ever more diverse with respect to factors such as migration channel, legal status, language, and
religion (Faist 2010a). The seminal shift from a rights-based to a resource-based approach in dealing
with cultural difference means that there are aspects of cultural heterogeneity around immigration
which are not subject to politicization in the national public sphere. It is of interest that these zones of
de-politicization are to be found on the level of organizations.

Implications for Migrant Integration and Social Cohesion

Social conflicts are transformed into meta-issues which seem to be only remotely related to actual
processes around immigration. The transnationalized social question thus refers not only to issues
clearly beyond the national state but also to the very internal dynamics of national states. The way
contemporary economic liberalism and modern-day populism have interacted to co-constitute the
social question makes this obvious. In short, market liberalism has tried to take the politics out of the
economy by prescribing deregulation as the only solution to problems of low growth and low
productivity, and right-wing populism as a form of securitization tends to take the politics out of the
polity by speaking of one homogeneous people.
The most important mechanisms constituting the internalization of the social question consist of
ranking along class lines in market liberalization and culturalized homogenization, essentialization,
dichotomization, and hierarchization in securitization and populism. Counter-mechanisms are
redistribution, catching up, and inclusion with respect to market liberalization and de-
commodification, and de-categorization, re-categorization, and de-hierarchization of heterogeneities
with respect to cultural pluralism and securitization. All these mechanisms depend on rights—social,
political, and cultural—upon which migrants and the advocates of pluri-cultural societies stage their
claims.
There seems to exist a relationship between market liberalization and exclusivist attitudes toward
religious minorities. Studies suggest that intensified market liberalization has accompanied a
foregrounding of individual responsibility and a focus on individuals’ resources such as human
capital. It can be shown empirically how levels of market-liberal adoption of policies co-vary with
the way citizens draw symbolic boundaries along the lines of ethno-religious otherness and moral
deservingness (Mijs, Bakhtiari, and Lamont 2016). In other words, members of states that have
implemented more rigorous market-liberal policies over the last two decades tend to draw more
fixed boundaries between themselves and those not welcome. In Europe, data from the European
Values Study (EVS) indicate a strengthening of animosity toward ethno-religious others, Muslims in
particular. For example, citizens increasingly do not want Muslims as their neighbours. Overall, the
data from two waves of the EVS in 1990 and 2010 suggest that the introduction and implementation of
market-liberal policies lead to more narrow definitions of membership vis-à-vis certain groups,
namely those not welcome on socio-cultural grounds.
To shed light on the consequences of the politics around cultural diversity and homogeneity, it is
helpful to look at the desirability of certain immigrant groups for economic purposes (wanted) and
their acceptance as socio-cultural actors (welcome; see Table 8.1). In other words, the economic
field is oriented along criteria of desirability for market processes, whereas the cultural field divides
along criteria of recognition. In this way we arrive at the four options displayed in Table 8.3:
integration, discrimination, exclusion, and toleration.3 The table refers to both conventional
categories of labour migrants and refugees. As much as in the long run labour migrants cannot be
relegated to an economic role only, so the countries of destination cannot but conceive of refugees as
socio-cultural actors after some time.
Table 8.3. The social question: wanted and/or welcome

Welcome Socio-cultural recognition Wanted Economic demand

Yes No
Yes Integration (1) Toleration (4)
e.g. highly skilled, ‘modern’ labour e.g. ‘deserving’ asylum seekers
migrants
No Discrimination (2) Exclusion (3)
e.g. ‘backward’ labour migrants in e.g. ‘undeserving’ irregular migrants
Europe and asylum seekers

Among the wanted, there is the distinction between one category which is culturally welcome and
the other which is not. Both categories enjoy more or less full social protection in the respective
welfare states. Those who are wanted and welcome around Europe and North America currently fall
into the category of integration (1), that is, the expectation by the majority society is that people in
this category adapt to the immigration country after some time. Among them are currently the highly
skilled. Viewed in historical perspective, some of the guest-worker groups who arrived in Germany
in the 1960s and early 1970s are perceived to be now integrated with respect to acculturation,
placement, interaction, and identification, such as many of those who hailed from Spain or Greece
(Woellert et al. 2009).
Those often called labour migrants are ‘wanted but not welcome’ (Zolberg 1987). They are
exposed to discrimination by way of non-recognition in the cultural realm (2). In this category, low
status, with respect to social class, and cultural discrimination sometimes go together, as in the case
of many of the descendents of those classified as the children of former guest-workers of Muslim
background in Germany. They are those whose labour at some time was in demand but whose fit for
full membership has been in doubt. Many of the issues around culture are projected upon people and
groups in this category. This analysis focuses on type (2) by suggesting two social mechanisms
through which culturalist securitization (re)produces inequalities between established groups and
outsiders: symbolic closure and discursive ranking.
The mechanism of symbolic closure works primarily through the specific mechanism of cultural
ascription. It pertains, for example, to the question of whether Islam is a part of the contemporary
German cultural landscape. Former Federal President Christian Wulff initiated a debate in 2010 when
he claimed: ‘But Islam nowadays also belongs to Germany’ (‘Aber der Islam gehört inzwischen auch
zu Deutschland’). Critics immediately conceded the point but emphasized that ‘we’ are steeped in the
‘Judeo-Christian tradition’. Then Prime Minister of Hessia, Volker Bouffier, claimed that
Christendom and Islam are fundamentally incompatible as long as there is no liberalized, European
Islam (Langenohl and Rauer 2012).
In public debates in Germany we can also discern a second mechanism, the discursive ranking of
cultures by way of distinguishing various categories of migrants and mobiles. As pointed out above,
there is a clear distinction around the cultural desirability of distinct groups: in Germany, practices
such as speaking the country-of-origin language at home are sometimes considered a first step
towards exclusion and segregation (Göktürk, Gramling, and Kaes 2007: 303). This may result in the
symbolic devaluation of a (potential) resource such as country-of-origin language. In essence, this
devaluation is legitimized through reference to socio-cultural backwardness and the danger of
segregation. In this perspective, cultural pluralism or multiculturalism simply is another term for an
undesirable ‘parallel society’. By contrast, for highly skilled aliens or citizens, moving into or out of
Germany, such practices are discussed without any culturalist ranking but as a prerequisite for
increasing economic competitiveness of the national economy and thus as a marker of diversity, and
as a jump start for persons who experience upwardly mobile patterns (Faist and Ulbricht 2017).
The distinction between categories (1) and (2) in Table 8.3 is not only class-based but exposes the
double standards applied to immigrants by groups in the majority population. This becomes obvious
when we seek to answer the question: who is the perfectly integrated citizen (in Germany)?
Following Umberto Eco (2000), the integrated or incorporated person is the conformist—and not the
one who exclusively cherishes national ideals. This is because integration in modern societies does
not occur primarily through moral values and norms. In societies characterized by a high degree of
functional differentiation, participation in the fields of education, economy, polity, religion, and so on,
matter much. To secure opportunities in these fields, parents in many European countries make sure
that their children learn English as early as possible, beginning in kindergarten. Certainly, they do not
rely solely on knowledge of the official national language.
There is also the category of those who are neither wanted economically nor welcome culturally.
This category is exclusion (3). In it we find the irregular migrants who do not have legally sanctioned
access to the institutions of the civil and the welfare state, and where access, such as emergency
hospital treatment, carries the risk of expulsion (e.g. Cyrus and Vogel 2006). Categories (2)
(discrimination) and (3) (exclusion) are usually portrayed as constituting a severe social problem of
sorts.
The last category includes those who are usually not wanted for economic reasons but are
nonetheless sometimes welcome. The case is thus one of toleration (4). An example of a group in this
category would be asylum seekers whose claims are seen as legitimate, such as refugees from war-
torn regions like Syria and Iraq in some European countries in 2015, as opposed to those originating
from West African countries like Nigeria and Senegal or Afghanistan in Central Asia (Bundesamt für
Migration und Flüchtlinge 2016)—despite the fact that Afghanistan, during the 2010s, ranked among
the four least peaceful countries on the globe. Refugees from the latter regions stand a much lower
chance of recognition as legitimate refugees. Over time the protection status even for those from Syria
and Iraq has declined.4 In general, belonging to this category hinges on morally accepted
deservingness. Only those who are innocent and can be pitied are ‘victims with high moral currency’
(Rothe 2011; see also Enns 2012). The distinction by country of origin and involvement in one’s
suffering is therefore inextricably linked to the assumed deservingness of a refugee.
The categorizations just painted in broad strokes reflect the general social mechanisms which are
at work: integration, discrimination, exclusion, and toleration. The boundaries along such categories
are not necessarily impermeable when seen in a longer-term perspective. The blurring of racial,
ethnic, and religious boundaries is enforced by a human rights discourse that stigmatizes group-level
exclusion, but implicitly may sanction individual-level exclusion based on criteria such as language
and human capital. Ironically, blaming individuals for their own fate usually creates new categories
of the excluded, such as those forced migrants who, for lack of alternatives, cross borders illegally
and find themselves cast as undocumented migrants. In a nutshell, instead of past exclusion based on
ethnic origin and outright group characteristics, contemporary practices have come to focus much
more on economic competitiveness and cultural modernity, holding persons responsible for their fate
as individuals.

Outlook: The Increasing Significance of Culture and the Continued Salience of

Class
Market liberalization, de-commodification, securitization, and cultural pluralism in light of the rights
revolution have been identified as master processes which provide the main pillars of the dynamics
of the politics of (in)equality and integration. Market liberalization and (to some extent) de-
commodification serve as a basis for class distinctions among migrants, or at least reinforce them,
while securitization plays upon class distinctions in the effort to culturalize them, and constructs
certain immigrant culture(s) as a threat to homogeneity and welfare state solidarity. Over the past few
decades, the grounds for the legitimization of inequalities have shifted. Ascriptive traits have been
complemented by the alleged cultural dispositions of immigrants and the conviction that immigrants
as individuals are responsible for their own fate. Such categorizations start by distinguishing
legitimate refugees from non-legitimate forced migrants. Another important trope is the alleged
illiberal predispositions of migrants and their unadaptability to modernity (cf. Triadafilopoulos,
Adamson, and Zolberg 2011). Bringing together market liberalization and culturalized securitization,
the current results could be read as Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic reloaded (Weber 1980): politics
and policies seem to reward specific types of migrants and refugees, exclude the low- and non-
performers in the market, and reward those who espouse liberal attitudes. In brief, it is a process of
categorizing migrants into useful or dispensable.
Migration is a crucial lens through which to explore today’s transnationalized social question.
While mobilization along axes such as class continues, a seminal shift toward cultural heterogeneities
and mobilization has occurred. This has not simply led to a displacement of class by status and
cultural politics. After all, class politics is also built along cultural boundaries, such as working-
class culture, or bourgeois culture (or the more fine-grained distinctions by Pierre Bourdieu along
various forms of capital and habitus: see Swartz 2013). Nonetheless, the heterogeneities that are
contested in the contemporary period have somewhat shifted: cultural heterogeneities now stand at the
forefront of debate and contention. Given the finding of this analysis that class inequality is
inextricably linked to cultural inequality, one should not speak of the declining significance of class
but rather of the increasing significance of culture and status politics.
The future of this dynamic arrangement is highly uncertain. What can be observed is a trend
toward both a de-politicized and a politicized development of heterogeneities in European public
spheres. As to trends toward de-politicization, multicultural group rights, in particular, have been
contentious and criticized as divisive. What we have seen is a displacement of multicultural language
for a semantic of diversity or even super-diversity in market-liberal thinking and a semantic of threat
in nationalist-populist rhetoric. Given this background, it is possible that market liberalization has
also contributed to the decline of a rights-based approach and the rise of a resource-based approach.
With specific regard to culture, we have seen a shift in policies from group rights to individual
resources which can be tapped for enterprises, especially in the private sector. Incidentally, this has
had implications for the transnational realm as well. For example, the World Bank has for years
propagated a resource-based approach to link migration to development in casting migrants as
development agents of their countries of origin through financial remittances (see also Chapters 3 and
7).
While a de-politicization of cultural heterogeneities through diversity management may help to
achieve partial equality in organizations, multicultural policies are strongly linked to national
projects. After all, such policies are meant to foster national integration and the social integration of
immigrants as minorities into national life. Nonetheless, not only social rights but also cultural rights
have been increasingly cast by international organizations as human rights, which have a global reach
but have to be implemented by national states to become effective. From all we know these policies
are likely to remain the chief target of securitizing and xenophobic efforts. While the rhetorical
criticism of multiculturalism steadily increases and its claims are disputed, existing multicultural
policies are not reversed to the same extent. Quite to the contrary: the political struggle is on-going.

Notes
1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/hottest-chart-economics-means.
2. This change in policy is in tune with findings in experimental political psychology with data from the USA and the Netherlands.
According to this research, public support for individual immigrant acceptance is explained mostly by their occupational and
educational credentials and not so much by family status or skin colour (Turper et al. 2015).
3. Here, integration is understood as successful insertion or incorporation (Morawska 2009) of migrants into the following realms of an
immigration state: acculturation (knowledge of the immigration country’s language and interaction skills); placement and participation
(e.g. in work and politics of the immigration country); interaction (social ties to immigrants and non-immigrants); and identification
(sense of belonging to the immigration country or other polities). Integration also refers to how non-migrant actors and institutions
respond to immigration, and thus concerns the broader context of societal cohesion in which transnationalization is addressed (Faist
1995b). For transnational forms of integration, see Chapter 9.
4. http://www.asylumineurope.org/reports/country/germany/asylum-procedure/treatment-specific-nationalities.
9

Emigration
Development and Diaspora in Global Nations

With respect to emigration regions, the concern with market liberalization and (de-)commodification
is reflected in the debates on migration and development, while securitization and cultural pluralism
find their reflection in challenges to national states, among other ways, through diaspora politics.
Cross-border practices and the presence of transnationally active groups and associations are
testimony to the transnationalized character of social inequalities and social protection, and the
politics around them. Diaspora is an example of how communal relations are constituted. They are
not to be conceived ‘as a “basis” or a “given” of the social but as a product of social processes’
(Sökefeld 2006: 281). In a way, diaspora can be conceived as ‘domestic abroad’ (Varadarayan 2010:
6–7), the mirror image of the idea of internalized and externalized control elaborated in preceding
chapters. However, diasporas and other cross-border groups are not simply an extension of homeland
politics and preferences. Instead, they represent distinct forms of agency even though attachment to the
country of origin remains (Adamson 2012; Özkul 2016). Diaspora mobilization may occur in the
country of immigration, and even among children of migrants; as in the case of the Kurdish diaspora
in Sweden and Germany (Baser 2015).
Again, both economic and cultural inequalities are at the forefront of political conflicts around the
social question. For example, from the point of view of states of origin, emigrants are often portrayed
as members of a nation, a religious group, or an ethnic category. Certain heterogeneities such as
ethnicity tend to become salient in the process of cross-border mobilities. Issues of development and
migrant groups active across borders are eminently transnational in character, as both migration and
development and diasporas depend on cross-border social and symbolic ties and institutional
linkages between emigration and immigration regions in transnational social spaces. Emigrants
themselves sometimes organize in transnationally oriented groups rallying around ethnicity,
nationality, or religion. Yet there is a decisive difference to the conditions in immigration states: quite
often, the politics of rights is not as dominant as the mobilization around resources. For example, dual
nationality is discussed less as a right for which emigrants are eligible and more as a resource
through which the emigration state can maintain links with its citizens abroad, garner remittances, and
encourage return (Leblang 2015).
Seen against this background, the main question in this chapter is: how are social inequalities—
economic, political, and cultural—(re)produced in emigration states of the global South? The
proposition advanced is that the processes of national development, market liberalization,
securitization, and transnationalization around diaspora constitute the core of the transnationalized
social question in emigration states. For comparative purposes, the welfare state of the global North
and the development state of the global South can be seen as functional equivalents in that they
address issues arising from social transformation and associated risks. By and large, in the global
South, there has been a shift from the national development state to a focus on international
organizations, the local state, and, partly, migrant associations, accompanied by market liberalization.
As to the latter, migrants are cast as development agents by international organizations and
governments. While the rhetoric of migration and development pervades discourses on global,
national, and local levels of governance, its manifest function is not a decisive contribution to macro-
economic development although it may have positive effects on the meso-level (e.g. community
infrastructure) and the micro-level (e.g. household consumption and investments in agriculture,
education, and health). Its main latent function is to legitimize an international or even global order
which has cast migrants as agents of development. It is a sort of shifting of responsibility to migrants
for home country development, akin to externalization of migration control.
Several countries are included in this chapter’s analysis in order to exploit a wide range of
subjects with respect to the transnationalized social question. Therefore, this chapter covers mainly
regions from which migrants to Europe originate: West Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and
Central Asia.
This chapter is structured as follows. The first part portrays the outlines of the politics of
development, diaspora, and membership, which serves as a frame for the subsequent analysis. The
second part outlines the mostly bilateral framework of regulating labour migration and its
transnational dimensions. In order to enquire into the governance of migration, the concept of ‘fair
migration’ is discussed, which supposedly results in a win-win-win situation for emigration state,
immigration state, and migrants. The third section deals with the impact of market liberalization on
the political economy of remittances as part of the migration–development nexus. The political fallout
of remittances and the contribution to social protection are embedded in this portrait. We then move
on to focus on political change induced by emigration and the politics of resources vs. rights in the
fourth section. The fifth section turns to membership and culturalization, emphasizing the changing
meaning and function of diaspora. This part also discusses how emigrant national states conceive of
themselves. It thus delves into the imaginaries of global nation, diaspora, and other concepts used to
describe the cross-border maze enacted through migration. The outlook discusses diasporas as joint
processes of marketization and culturalization, producing migrants as a subject which now carries
responsibilities for development; an idea which can also be found in the debate on climate change
and migration.

Development, Diaspora, and Membership

The issues of economic development, securitization, and resources and rights are tightly interlinked
through the politics of membership. We can speak of such emigration states as transnationalized or
transborder states. In emigration countries, some governments even speak of a ‘global nation’, and
analysts observe a ‘multisite nation’ (Laguerre 2016: 34). Such transnationalized states seek, in effect,
to build the nation across the core territory by including migrants, often inducing them to invest
capital, to send remittances, and to return, all the while seeking to maintain their loyalty. For example,
towards this end such states extend their consular services to their citizens abroad. They also entice
emigrants and returnees to invest financial and other capital in their (former) home country. Various
emigration states have established ministries of migration and tourism to cater to these issues—among
them Turkey, Russia, Ghana, and India. Emigrant and diaspora organizations, in turn, are variously
engaged in development schemes and projects of political or even regime change in the countries of
origin. In part, the rights revolution also comes into play in that states sometimes extend political and
social rights to citizens living abroad, such as social insurance for return migrants, or voting rights
from abroad. More than 115 states allow some sort of expatriate voting (A. Ellis and Wall 2007).
And emigrants, at times, make claims for individual and collective rights from abroad—very
prominently those seeking to carve out their own national state, for instance. The Kurdistan Workers
Party, which operates not only in Turkey but also across Europe, is one of the most prominent
examples. In general, diasporas and return migrants may carry with them ideas about how the
political and welfare system should be reformed or even overthrown (Sheffer 2003). Generally
speaking, as in the immigration states, it is above all a politics of membership that matters for
structures and perceptions of political and cultural (in)equalities.
Again, as with immigration countries, both securitization and concomitant culturalization come
into play, albeit in a different guise. With respect to securitization, emigration state governments have
at times viewed emigration as a political safety valve to get rid of political dissidents (cf. Hirschman
1981: 225–8), and are sometimes challenged by diasporic groups from abroad (see e.g. Koinova
2013). One of the main goals of creating active links to citizens living abroad and their organizations
is to control them with respect to their political engagement (Gabrielli, Gsir, and Zapata-Barrero
2017). From a cross-border perspective it is also evident that immigration states have increasingly
sought to institute migration control in countries of origin and transition through imposing control
regimes. Securitization is exported mainly from immigration to emigration regions. Such an approach
has included, for example, cooperation with police and security forces in the countries of emigration,
often coupled with trade and security cooperation but also migration–development schemes, clauses
on extradition of migrants to countries of origin in EU treaties with third countries, and circular
migration programmes. In a way, the securitization of border control has not been limited to internal
and border controls in immigration regions but now encompasses whole migration systems.
One may speak of culturalization in that governments of countries of origin conceive of their
citizens abroad mainly as co-nationals and some as co-religionists. The terms used in academia and
politics to capture the emigration context also point to culturalized expressions, such as diaspora.
These concepts come up again and again with respect to both economic development and the politics
of nation-building. This emigration-side trend has accelerated since the end of the Cold War and the
breakdown of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Ethno-nationalism has reigned supreme in cases as
diverse as Mexico, Ethiopia, and Sri Lanka (Lyons and Mandaville 2012). Nonetheless, to take
culturalized concepts as the main category of inequality politics would be incomplete. This is
suggested by findings that the class dimension in emigration countries, such as privileges of class and
caste, are generally not radically altered and are sometimes even strengthened by and in migration
processes (Chapter 3). Moreover, cross-border migration as a strategy to better life chances has not
necessarily improved crucial areas such as social protection on a large scale (Chapters 4, 5, and 6).
In a way, from an emigration country point of view, the state is becoming extraterritorialized. To
indicate this trend, some authors have used terms such as ‘emigrant nation’ (Choate 2009). From a
civil society point of view, the diaspora constitutes a de-territorializing element insofar as
transnationally active groups claim to be connected with both emigration and immigration countries
and locales (albeit to varying degrees), or even all the countries in which fellow citizens live. One
may conceive of this trend as a turn towards simultaneity: the idea, suggested by the transnational
turn, that emigrants lose presence at home and never become complete members in the new country is
replaced by the notion that they may be present both in the immigration and emigration locales.
The importance of cross-border patterns, such as emigrant nation, global nation, or diaspora, is by
now ubiquitously apparent, although not all emigration countries have explicit policies. Reaching out
to emigrants has been one of the ideological prerequisites to entice emigrants to invest in their
(former) homeland, or to return and bring with them skills and other resources. Emigration country
governments tend to view resources supplied by emigrants, circular migrants, or return migrants from
an instrumental point of view. Even dual citizenship is often dealt with as a resource and not as a
right. But diaspora—used here as a concept of practice and not analysis (Brubaker 2005: 12)—is
also a way for emigrants to challenge the political regime in their country of origin. Nowadays
emigration country governments strive hard to maintain links, while emigrant associations of all sorts
seek to leverage their influence on the affairs of their country of origin. The present shape of this
setup is of relatively new vintage. After the breakdown of communist regimes in Eastern Europe,
emigrant groups across the globe, which until then were mainly framed in terms of the East–West
conflict, had to reorient themselves and find new fields of practice. In some emigration countries
nation-building in the classical sense is still a preoccupation, especially for stateless diasporas or
challenger diasporas, for example in the Middle East; in others, economic development and political
change are at the top of the agenda, as in parts of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.
While cross-border migration constitutes an important aspect of social change in emigration
regions, it needs to be contextualized with respect to its volume. Evidence strongly suggests that
cross-border migration rates within and out of the global South are similar to those found in Europe
during the age of industrialization and urbanization (Abel and Sander 2014). First, there has been a
rapid growth of the proletariat, above all in the global South: the working-age population doubled
between 1980 and 2000 in absolute numbers, while it shrank in the global North (R. Freeman 2012).
Second, global income distribution—expressed in the ‘elephant curve’ (Chapter 8)—suggests that
income growth occurred not only among the 1 per cent (100th percentile) but also among the emerging
middle classes in the global South over the past twenty years. In very concrete terms of income, there
has been both a developing middle class with income of c.US$4–13 a day and a developed middle
class with a daily income of more than US$13 in the global South (Kapsos and Bourmpoula 2013). To
add a caveat at once, such structural conditions in the global South do not translate automatically into
higher rates of cross-border migration, and for various reasons. First, migrants from the global South
face restrictive policies in destination countries in the global North. This is true for both forced
migrants and labour migrants, though there are exceptions for some categories (Chapter 7). Second,
discrepancies in average income between the global South and the global North do not in themselves
turn potential into actual migrants. It is rather the experience of relative deprivation among those
having sufficient resources to migrate across borders that matters. Third, even under the same macro-
structural conditions, people show different mobility behaviours. Persons would emigrate from some
areas but not from others. In order to account for such differences, we need to introduce the ‘missing
meso-link’ of migrant networks, migration networks, and other elements of a conducive migration
infrastructure (Faist 2000). Despite relatively low rates of cross-border migration, however,
inequalities between the global South and the global North constitute a frame in which the
consequences of cross-border mobility have important repercussions also for the countries in the
global South.
 If we take two dimensions, general economic and cultural social processes, and an understanding
of narrow and broad emigration polity, a scheme emerges as shown in Table 9.1. In the politico-
economic realm, we can distinguish between national development based on rights of the members of
the polity vs. development based on resources. In other words, there is a tension between the
perspective that sees emigrants primarily as political subjects, vs. an instrumental view of migrants
as carriers of resources, above all human and financial capital, akin to market liberalization. Over the
past two decades, migrants have been conceived as agents of development in their own right. In a
narrow understanding, emigrants are carriers of human capital, of educational credentials and skills
which can be applied in the economic sphere. Viewed from a state’s perspective, we may speak of
the transformation of the national development state into a competition state in the sense that
economic development now is perceived to partly hinge on the skills of the workforce. From the point
of view of emigration states as economic actors, a brain drain of talents and a brawn drain of manual
skills are to be avoided—and financial remittances of emigrants living abroad are definitely to be
welcomed. In practice, it is hard to avoid brain drain since selected categories of highly skilled
persons usually face better job opportunities abroad. This is part of a larger conflict of interest
between immigration and emigration countries: ‘(T)he tug-of-war re-emerges perennially, as poorer
states seek to retain valuable populations while welcoming opportunities to “shovel out” the surplus,
and while richer ones are equally intent upon acquiring valuable populations while deterring the entry
of undesirables’ (Zolberg 2007: 55). Moreover, some emigration country regimes tend to be
interested in getting rid of politically unwanted and unwelcome persons who belong to the opposition
critical of the regime. The move from the national development state to the competition state
envisaged in market liberalization has been far from complete. In a broad understanding of
development, emigrants and circular and return migrants are not only vessels of human capital but as
citizens also bearers of rights and claims-makers. For example, collectively organized emigrants in
hometown associations may decide to use funds for infrastructural projects. Most often, such
collective endeavours are organized on a translocal level, crossing borders.
Table 9.1. General social processes in emigration contexts

General Understanding of emigration polity

processes
Narrow (nation at home) Broad (global nation)
Politico- National development Market liberalization
economic Economic development based on rights: emigrants as Economic development based on resources: emigrants as
claims-makers and rights bearers carriers of capital and remittance providers
National development state Competition state
Socio- Securitization Transnationalization
cultural Emigration and diasporization as dangerous to state: Emigration and diaspora as an asset: migrants as a global
migrants as a threat national community
National security state Transnational state

Taking up the second dimension, socio-cultural processes, emigration can be seen as a threat to
national security, or as an opportunity, of emigration states to go global—a clear case of exit
followed by voice on the part of migrants. Driving the political dynamics is the tension between
emigrants as security risks in the view of emigration and immigration governments on the one hand,
and the inclusion of emigrants into an emigrant nation on the other. This tension refers to the
mechanisms of securitization vs. transnationalization; in other words, between a security state and a
transnational state. Seen from the national security state, emigrants and/or return migrants can be cast
as a threat, especially when they are organized collectively to call for reforms from abroad or even
engage in changing the regime. Groupings such as those variably called freedom fighters or terrorists
serve as paradigmatic examples. At the same time, governments may view citizens abroad or
diasporas as an opportunity to strengthen linkages with foreign states, promoting trade and investment
(not only but also by emigrants). Another benefit could be to entice emigrants to keep their ties and/or
renew them. In this case, the aspect of the transnational state shifts to the centre of attention; a state
which includes its extraterritorial population within the national fold. This is also exemplified by
emigration states as global nation states who offer help to citizens abroad in the field of social
protection.

The Political Economy of Migration: From Asymmetric to Fair Migration?

Take Germany, Turkey, and the Philippines as examples of the politico-economic patterns involved in
cross-border migration. In Germany, three decisive periods of immigration can be examined to
unearth the structural conditions for the migration–development nexus, paralleling the general phases
sketched previously (Chapter 7): the period of guest-worker migration in the 1960s and 1970s (with
Turkey as the emigration country), the period of restriction in the 1980s and 1990s, and the phase of
renewed interest in the migration–development nexus with a focus on market-liberal and rights-based
approaches in the 2000s (with the Philippines as the emigration country). Although the numbers of
migrants involved are vastly different—several million in the former versus a couple of thousand in
the latter case—these two forms signal the changing global conditions under which labour is
recruited.
In the first case, the focus of the emigration side—Turkey—clearly was on the expected benefits of
migration in terms of reducing unemployment, easing balance of payment deficits, and contributing to
local, regional, and national development through financial remittances and a transfer of skills
(Abadan-Unat 2011: chapter 1). It should also not be forgotten that emigration country governments
expected their mostly male migrants to become ‘modern’ subjects by adopting the mores and values of
the global North, expressed not only in the work ethic but also in mundane habits of dress (see also
Wilson 2007). Although the expectations were often misguided, migration was in fact materially
beneficial with respect to consumption on the household level. The most plausible proposition is that
it was not migration alone that stimulated economic development at the time. Other, even more
relevant factors included the infrastructure for economic development, economic policies, the social
structure, and the political context in states and regions of origin (e.g. Penninx 1982: 814–5). The
rights of migrants did not enter into the discourse on the part of the country of origin. This stands in
contrast to the country of destination: granting formal social rights to Turkish migrant workers akin to
those enjoyed by domestic workers played a role in the German union’s acceptance of the guest-
worker programmes in the early 1960s.
In general, the previous guest-worker programmes from the 1950s to the 1970s and, more recently,
the contract-worker programmes of the 1990s have reflected a concern with economic development
and demography in emigration states as a framing narrative. The guest-worker programmes started
with the promise of alleviating unemployment in the countries of origin, promoting the acquisition of
skills and a transfer to the origin regions, and enabling financial remittances along the way. The
contract-worker programmes, which Germany concluded with Poland, the Czech Republic, and
Hungary, among others, were legitimized as pre-EU accession aid (Faist et al. 1999). Today, the
framing narrative has changed, not least in light of competition between countries of destination for
highly skilled labour from the global South and the continued criticism of brain drain. Now there is an
emphasis on migration that is ‘fair’ to all actors involved. It shows the tension between market-liberal
against rights-based approaches to public policy in this field.
In addition to facilitating the migration of the wanted and the welcome, the discourse has changed
regarding the type of migration deemed desirable. There has been vibrant discussion, for example, on
circular migration based on the experiences of Turkey, Mexico, Australia, and South Korea (Castles
and Özkul 2014). There are a number of rationales behind this upswing of interest in circular
migration on the part of immigration countries (Wickramasekara 2011). Circular migration can be
seen as an alternative to traditional guest- or contract-worker schemes, given that a certain percentage
of temporary migrants in the past remained permanently in the recruiting countries. In circular
migration programmes, at least in theory, labour is more disposable, for example, in economic
downturns. In other words, wanted labour does not raise issues of welcome, that is, labour does not
turn into cultural and political subjects. In addition, circular migration, at least since the report of the
GCIM (GCIM 2005), has been touted as having an elective affinity with the goals pursued in the
migration–development debate, that is, a win-win-win situation for countries of origin, countries of
destination, and the migrants themselves, by having relatively high rates of remittance transactions.
Yet, as various critics have pointed out, a standpoint based solely on economic gains does not take
into account the human rights (including social rights) of migrants (cf. Van Ginneken 2013). This idea
has been extended to argue for the support of a rights-based approach to migration and the importance
of labour rights (Schierup et al. 2015).
The idea of circular migration in the aforementioned policy documents and discussions should not
detract attention from actually existing circular migration patterns in regions such as Southeast Asia
which have implications for the generation of social inequalities. The regulation of (circular)
migration is accompanied by an increasing number of private recruitment agencies that become
brokers between state authorities, employers abroad, and prospective migrants in villages and towns
across countries such as China and Indonesia (Xiang and Lindquist 2014). In this way, new forms of
migration regulation not only speak to changing migration governance under conditions of
transnationalization (see also Lindquist 2015) but also to the social mechanisms of brokerage which
are relevant for (re)production of social inequalities. Basically, three types of brokerage can be
distinguished (Faist 2014c). First, there is partisan arbitration, which refers to civil society
organizations that intervene on behalf of, for example, forced migrants vis-à-vis states. Many
humanitarian (I)NGOs fall into this category, sometimes called the ‘rescue industry’ (Gammeltoft-
Hansen and Nyberg Sørensen 2013). This is more of an equality-generating mechanism. Second, there
is the tertius gaudens, a type of broker who exploits a divergence of interest of two elements (actors)
out of which s/he draws an advantage (Simmel 1992 [1908]: 139–40). A case in point is skilled
workers from India (e.g. software engineers) as part of the global IT labour market. This involves
specific kinds of recruitment agencies called ‘body shops’ (Xiang 2007). These agencies recruit IT
workers as project-based labour. The body shops manage workers on behalf of employers, and are
sometimes employers themselves, and thus offer services which range from sponsoring workers’
temporary work visas to paying their salaries and arranging for accommodation. Since workers and
employers do not enter into any direct relationships, employees can be retrenched at any time. These
migrant workers thus carry the brunt of the costs and the risks. The third type is divide et impera:
states themselves may act as divide and rule brokers, and they may do so by colluding with certain
types of migrant labour brokers. In the East Asian case, Chinese state agencies directly structure
markets for intermediaries (Xiang 2013). For example, when the Chinese state got out of the business
of directly linking workers and foreign employers, as in the case of employers in Japan, it conferred
primary agency to intermediaries. One result, among others, was a downward allocation of liability
to the individual migrant—a clear case of hierarchization of control.
Quite at the opposite end of the spectrum, various new schemes claim that a triple-win scenario
can be implemented successfully in a sustainable recruitment model in which the human and social
rights of migrants are observed. One of the projects that aimed to foster fair migration is known as the
‘Triple Win Project’ or ‘500 Nurses for Germany’ (Mosuela 2018). Its goal was sustainable
recruitment of nurses from the Philippines to Germany to alleviate the nursing shortage in Germany,
reduce unemployment in the Philippines, and facilitate migrants’ sending of remittances and
transferring of know-how to contribute to development. In general, this list is close to the
expectations expressed in the guest-worker era. In addition to the scheme involving the Philippines,
other agreements in the Triple Win Project were concluded with Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Tunisia, and Vietnam—the latter country with respect to geriatric nurses. The Triple Win Project
foresaw and implemented a highly selective and lengthy ‘sustainable’ recruitment process, which was
supposed to adhere to ideas of fairness and ethical recruitment in the international migration of health
care workers. This would imply that there was no loss of skills to the Philippines, indeed no brain
drain. The three-year Triple Win Project involving Germany and the Philippines (2011–14)
corresponded to the approach of the ILO intended to set standards of fair migration and decent work
within the context of governing labour migration for development. It was designed to raise awareness
about safe, ethical, and decent migration, and voluntary return for health care professionals (ILO
2010).1 In this spirit the Triple Win Project adhered to recommendations such as the practice of
ethical recruitment advocated by the WHO (implementation of the WHO Global Code of Practice on
the International Recruitment of Health Personnel) and the agenda of decent work by the ILO.
As we have already seen in Chapter 8, an economically liberal approach does not necessarily
contradict a rights-based approach. The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA)
has been promoting Philippine labour power as an expression of a ‘labor brokerage system’, actively
promoting labour migration abroad (Rodriguez 2010). As a labour brokerage state, the Philippines
has adopted a market-liberal approach that properly trains its citizens to be fit for any work overseas
and has sent them as flexible workers while profiting from the financial remittances sent to the
Philippines. On the German side, the GIZ administered the Triple Win Project and took care of
distributing the (few) selected nurses to hospitals. For demographic reasons, among others, Germany
is an example of the ever-increasing demand for skilled health care workers in middle- and high-
income countries and thus for projects of this kind. The Triple Win Project was a combination of a
liberal market scheme with respect to training efforts in the Philippines and a rights-based approach,
ensuring basic social rights for Philippine nurses in German hospitals.
This combined economically liberal and rights-based approach pursued in the Triple Win Project
is open to serious criticism—although it has to be kept in mind that the numbers of nurses involved
are rather small. Recruitment of skilled personnel such as nurses tends to induce health personnel
shortages, and a diminishing quality of health care delivery, which puts at risk the welfare of already
vulnerable populations, in this case in the Philippines (Mackey and Liang 2012). This trend
endangers the achievement of basic welfare targets in any country. It also constitutes a loss of public
educational investment, skills, and financial investment (Yeates 2008). Furthermore, brain drain may
also lead to brain waste—in which skilled health workers give up or are excluded from health care
upon return to their country of origin (Connell and Walton-Roberts 2016). Already many of the nurse
graduates contribute to the ranks of unemployed health workers in the Philippines.
It is not only issues of brain drain that signal deep social inequalities. It is often observed that
discursive representations have given skilled Filipinos an edge over other migrants from the global
South in this world market for health workers. The labour power of Filipino workers is sometimes
even explicitly racialized or essentialized in terms of its flexibility (Mosuela 2018). Filipino nurses
and other labour can be seen by employers as a particularly manageable and even docile category; the
country of origin (i.e. nationality) thus serves as a proxy for expected docility. In the Triple Win
Project certain goals have not been met, such as the transfer of knowledge from German to Philippine
hospitals. Nonetheless, it is a case of ‘best practice’ in terms of efforts to address issues of brain
drain and the social rights of nurses involved and in comparison to other agreements the Philippines
has concluded with Japan and Canada. In the end, both remittances and knowledge transfer shift
accountability from the developmental national state involved to the migrant as a development actor.
It is the latter which is at the centre of the following analysis.

The Political Economy of Remittances and Social Protection

One of the goals of the Triple Win Project for Germany and the Philippines has been the transfer of
not only know-how but also financial remittances. The policy of remittances has been a way to make
migrants and their families responsible for achieving development and social protection. This
position has emerged as a kind of transnational meta-script, diffused across the programmatic
statements and practices of inter- and transnational organizations. Overall, remittances have been
identified by development agencies, the World Bank, governments, and other agents, as one important
way migrants and their significant others can initiate and respond to transformation in countries,
regions, and communities of origin. For many families of migrants and other members of migrants’
communities in countries of origin, individual and collective remittances represent an important
source of income for the financing of personal everyday needs as well as for the development of
community infrastructure. Individual remittances sent by migrants to their families for the purpose of
investing in food, health care, and education of children have, from an optimistic point of view, been
understood as a positive contribution to social and economic change. Collective remittances, often
managed by HTAs, are used mainly for the construction or maintenance of public buildings and for
offering social services, for instance related to health care and education (Duquette-Rury 2014).
HTAs often also engage in income-generating activities at the community and personal level,
including micro-credits for small individual or family-based projects. Finally, they sometimes
provide aid to community members affected by natural hazards, such as earthquakes or hurricanes
(Orozco and Rouse 2007).
Emigration states are to some degree competition states (Table 9.1). They mobilize emigrants in
order to ensure remittances or establish transnational business networks (e.g. Mullings 2011).
Remittances are not only important on the national level for purposes such as balancing foreign trade
deficits. They also have important political and social meanings at the community level. Remittances
enhance the economic and social status of the individual members of migrants’ families, and give
families more opportunities. Their newly acquired or simply consolidated social status may make
some members of migrants’ families eligible for leadership positions in various community
organizations. In this way, migrant families who have been involved in local politics consolidate their
leadership positions with the increased power brought by remittances, and those who have no such
experience may access political functions (e.g. Délano and Gamlen 2014). Such consequences of
financial remittances have to be seen against the background of emigration and its direct and indirect
effects. For example, emigration is likely to change the composition of the voting population in the
countries and locales of origin. The loss of these citizens as voters benefits the relatively well off and
influential, potentially by giving them greater voice (Guarnizo, Portes and Haller 2003).This fact, in
turn, could lead to a lower provision of public goods that benefit the general population. Internal
disputes about the use of money, the exclusion of some community members, particularly women,
from decision-making processes, as well as confrontations with local governments are some of the
negative aspects related to the work of HTAs in the Mexican emigration context (Fox and Bada
2008). Power inequalities between migrants and those who have remained in the communities can
also be expressed through the links of HTAs to local governments. We know that especially
economically weak emigration countries depend to a high degree on financial remittances from
abroad, as suggested by the relatively high shares of remittances as a percentage of GDP (Bakker
2014).
Remittances might even undermine the activity of state transfers in the realm of social protection.
There is some evidence towards this finding as to the effect of remittances on social spending in Latin
America: remittances are correlated to a contraction in social protection spending across Latin
American countries (Doyle 2015). The continuous receipt of remittances contributes significantly to
the income and the social protection of recipients. It is even likely that remittances will thus dampen
demand from this category of remittance receivers for state-funded social security because they act as
a substitute for social transfers. In the end, all of this may result in a reduction in state spending on
social security. If true, this could also have international ramifications. Remittances increase the
dependence of countries in the global South on migrants in immigration countries of the global North,
as evidenced by the high ratio of remittances as a share of GDP in countries such as Moldova, El
Salvador, and Bangladesh (World Bank Group 2016).
Financial remittances are implicated in shifting governance structures, giving emigrants and
diasporas a greater voice in the locales of origin. Local governments in countries of origin
increasingly rely on financial remittances as sources of income. This might lead local politicians to
prioritize the wishes of migrants over those of community dwellers in decisions about the investment
of remittances. Migrant associations sometimes even take over the responsibility of governments in
the provision of basic services for the population in regions of origin, as was the case of access to
health care in two villages in Senegal (Kane 2010). Individual actors as well as transnationally
active organizations are thus considered agents for the generation, promotion, and implementation of
development processes. This is closely linked to conceptions of migrants—individually and/or
collectively—as agents of development.
Emigration and remittances may also affect the provision of collective goods and services beyond
social protection, such as water supply, roads, and electricity grids, through changing the actors who
have political influence, the latter of which include lobbyists, campaign contributors, and voter
mobilizers. As we have already seen, emigrants are typically more likely to have a relatively higher
income, better education, and more political connections than non-migrants (Chapter 3). In short,
emigration is likely to tilt the non-electoral means of political influence (particularly lobbying in the
broadest sense) in favour of the relatives of middle-class migrants, but also strengthens the wealthier
and influential upper (middle) classes. Since the poor are less likely to have the time and connections
to lobby or engage in campaigns, it is highly probable that the loss of emigrants will allow local
elites to have an even stronger voice over the allocation of government resources. This may lead to
weaker support for collective goods. Furthermore, remittance-receiving households may disengage
from public life by obtaining private forms of collective goods, such as private schooling for their
children, their own water wells, and generators. Importantly, they may choose to opt out of public
provision (Abdih et al. 2012). But remittances can also increase the availability of resources, so that
remittance-receiving households have greater access to politicians and more time to engage in
politics. In a nutshell, while remittances may make those left behind more or less likely to vote, they
are clearly likely to give emigrant families more resources to influence politics through non-electoral
means, such as lobbying (e.g. Itzigsohn and Villacrés 2008).
A fundamental issue arising out of financial remittances is the problem of moral hazard (Burgess
2016). Because remittances tend to work in a counter-cyclical manner (Ebeke 2011), they might
incentivize governments to shirk their responsibilities to provide basic collective goods and maintain
citizens’ welfare. This effect might be most pronounced during natural disasters and crises when the
counter-cyclical nature of remittances can relieve the government of its responsibility to provide
social programmes and institutional support to the public (McLeman, Schade, and Faist 2016).
Remittance flows ‘allow households to purchase the public good rather than rely solely on the
government to provide that good, which reduces the household’s incentive to hold the government
accountable’ (Abdih et al. 2012: 664).
Overall, the available evidence suggests that the flows of emigrants and remittances alter patterns
of political influence and a population’s preferences for collective goods. Yet the total effect of
emigration on collective goods provision and thus also social protection is likely to be small in many
emigration states, perhaps because the negative direct effects of emigration are often compensated by
their positive indirect effects through remittances (e.g. Singh and Rajan 2016: 8–9). In particular,
remittances make up for emigration: areas with large numbers of emigrants have no less collective
goods than areas with few emigrants. Yet remittances lead to an increase in collective goods favoured
by the middle class. It is by self-selection that the middle classes are the most likely to emigrate and
hence most likely to remit larger sums. As to poverty reduction, there is some evidence that
remittances decrease poverty rates. Yet at current or even somewhat increased levels, remittances are
not a major instrument in significantly decreasing poverty in the country of origin. Rather, it is
political measures within these countries that matter (Chapter 3). For remittances to have a more
significant effect on the economic development of origin countries—as they seemed to have in the
nineteenth century in the case of Ireland and Italy (Tilly 2007)—the current rates of emigration would
probably need to be much higher (cf. Fischer, Martin, and Straubhaar 1997).
Since a high share of financial remittances is used for purposes which are at the heart of social
protection—namely education costs, for example school fees, or health expenses (e.g. Amakom and
Iheoma 2014)—the renewed policy emphasis of international organizations and national governments
on linking migration and development serves well to highlight the problems involved. Clearly,
remittances have ambiguous effects on the provision of social protection at best. Although positive
consequences can be seen for families left behind in the countries of emigration, issues arise such as
moral hazard and the transfer of responsibility from governments to migrants and their dependents.
When it comes to the social protection of emigrants themselves, only very few countries have
comprehensive protection schemes for their citizens living abroad, such as welfare funds for
emigrants and their families back home (Van Ginneken 2013). Two states in the global North, France
and Belgium, are so far the only states to provide full social benefits for their citizens
extraterritorially. Usually, social protection of the dependents of migrants is an outcome of patchwork
structures. As to countries in the global South, in the provision of social protection for both emigrants
and their dependents, several types of actors are involved, such as migrant benevolent associations in
the country of origin and/or destination, family and relatives, NGOs, religious associations, and states
(Chapter 4).

Rights-Based Development?

Any discussion of the role of rights and remittances for the transnationalized social question in
general must be prefaced by a caveat. In emigration states it is exceedingly difficult to measure
exactly how much influence transnationally active migrant associations and networks can exercise (cf.
Østergaard-Nielsen 2003). Moreover, it is hard to evaluate their claims to truly represent not only
diasporas but also dependents of migrants in village and neighbourhood communities at home. The
most we can ascertain is that they somehow represent migrants who try to exert influence from the
country of immigration into the origin context. There are no formal mechanisms of accountability.
Even more important, evidence of legitimacy based on political substance or content is often hard to
garner.
In order to further integration of migrants into the national fold, emigration countries use a battery
of approaches, extending to emigrants’ citizenship, and political, civil, and social rights. This is a
strong case of the internalization of transnationalization and transnationality in that some emigration
states adopt elements of a transnational state as a ‘global nation’. First, citizenship rights include
access to and renewal of citizenship, repatriation of citizens, restoration of citizenship, preferential
naturalization, and (un)restricted dual citizenship. In connection with the latter, some states offer their
emigrants dual citizenship with restrictions, a sort of ‘citizenship light’ (e.g. Cağlar 2006). For
example, governments may grant citizens abroad rights to acquire property and to vote but exclude
them from holding public office. Some states offer more extensive citizenship (rights) for emigrants—
for example, full voting rights from abroad. Nevertheless, practically all states have some temporal
or generational cut-off point at which citizenship is not granted to the children of emigrants who do
not entertain genuine links to the home country of their parents or grandparents.
Second, in addition to extraterritorial voting rights, emigrants’ political rights can encompass
special political representation in national assemblies, as is the case in Italy (Lafleur 2013). In fact,
most countries allow for the electoral participation of emigrants in some form. The most widespread
rule is that they must return to their district of origin to vote, although more and more states allow
their emigrants to vote from abroad. There does not appear to be a link with other non-political
interests: countries with proportionally large diasporas and remittance flows are no more likely to
permit extraterritorial voting than others (Gamlen 2014).
Third, consular services are available to protect the civil and human rights of emigrant citizens in
their respective countries and, particularly relevant for the transnationalized social question, to
ensure the transfer of social security benefits. The latter requires bilateral agreements, which are
more common among European countries than in Africa or Asia, or between states in Europe on the
one hand and those in Africa, Asia, or Latin America on the other. This state of affairs clearly signals
that citizens of EU member states are better able to enjoy the portability of social rights. Consulates
may also provide special identity cards for non-resident nationals. For instance, consular
identification cards issued to emigrants, which help them to open a bank account and to acquire a
driver’s licence in selected immigration countries, are available from states such as Argentina,
Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Peru, India, Morocco, and Pakistan. Also, the Philippines claims
to protect the welfare of its emigrant workers, from recruitment to return, and even to intervene in
labour disputes. On the immigration side, the political system as such is less important in influencing
migrants’ attitudes toward democratic values than are secure labour rights in combination with the
space offered for political action and personal freedom (Kessler and Rother 2016). The finding that
migrants from Hong Kong disproportionately support democratic norms and values strengthens the
proposition that the level of individual rights and political freedom affects migrants’ political
attitudes: although not a democratic political system, Hong Kong and similar immigration areas offer
migrants a modicum of personal freedom, labour rights, and the possibility of political organization
as migrant workers.
The extension of dual citizenship is one of the most tangible manifestations of this desire to
maintain connections on the part of emigration states. By treating migrants as part of their extended
nation, emigration states hope to increase the likelihood that their expatriates send back ‘both
physical capital in the form of remittances and the human capital embodied in themselves upon their
return’ (Leblang 2015: 3). The interesting question is whether the extension of citizen rights to
emigrants living abroad facilitates their country-of-origin engagement. Available evidence suggests
that expatriate dual citizenship rights help countries of origin to tap into their emigrants’ resources.
Dual citizenship generates larger remittances at the macro- and micro-levels and is associated with a
higher likelihood of return migration. This question, however, is difficult to disentangle empirically
as both dual citizenship and remittances are often driven by similar factors (Leblang 2015).2 To
complicate matters, case studies suggest that family and friendship ties are more important than legal
status for remittances and other kinds of country-of-origin engagement. China, for example, does not
tolerate dual citizenship. The social ties to families and communities in China, however, may have
favourable consequences for the readiness of emigrants to invest in the (former) home state. For
example, about 70 per cent of the foreign direct investment in the People’s Republic of China
between 1985 and 2000 came from overseas Chinese, including those residing in Taiwan (Goldin and
Reinert 2012: 195). What matters for cross-border engagement on the part of emigrants, is the strength
of family relationships and a sense of perceived external but informal membership in the country of
origin (see also Friedrich Ebert Stiftung 2011). Nonetheless, instruments such as dual citizenship
open possible avenues for engagement and constitute a strong symbolic statement on the part of the
emigration state.
In contrast to the extension of political rights, the cross-border reach of social rights to include
emigrants is much less pronounced. There is a veritable ‘protection gap’ for migrants in immigration
countries of the global North and the global South (Piper, Rosewame, and Withers 2016). Needless to
say, there are great variations in access to social rights for different categories of migrants, with low-
skilled temporary workers usually the least formally protected. In general, the decent work paradigm
goal propagated by the ILO has not been achieved (ILO 2017). Access to social rights is embedded in
the overall structural imbalance of economically stronger and weaker parts of the world. Uneven
socio-economic development is driving labour migration, and its outcomes, ceteris paribus, tend to
strengthen inequalities and asymmetries (Chapters 3 and 7). This situation is somewhat different on a
micro- and meso-level where we find gains for individual and small groups of migrants, such as a
reduction in poverty in families and an achievement of higher social status. But under conditions of
precarity of rights the outcomes nonetheless contradict the decent work paradigm advocated by the
ILO. One way of collectively addressing this issue in the political realm would be the cooperation of
emigration states in the global South (Castles and Delgado Wise 2007). The likelihood of successful
cooperation is, however, severely hampered by a sort of prisoner’s dilemma type of situation
(Zolberg 1992): although the collective benefit would be highest under terms of global South
cooperation, it would make sense for individual emigration states to break such agreements in order
to achieve short-term gains which are even higher. In this respect the mantra of global governance
therefore rings quite hollow—not only are labour migration systems regionalized, but global
governance elements in place (e.g. ILO conventions) fail to ensure that the ILO can enforce
compliance with conventions signed by states that violate such norms. Over the past decades, the
most egregious cases of social and labour rights violations have been recorded in the states of the
Gulf Council (UN 2016a).
Tension exists between ensuring social rights for migrants vs. exporting an optimum number
abroad, and also between global and regional governance of migrant workers’ rights, on the one hand,
and individual states which focus on state security and securitization, on the other. We thus find
migrant-worker organizations and/or NGOs pushing for migrants’ social and political rights, for
example in Southeast and East Asia (Grugel and Piper 2011). In this part of the world, as elsewhere,
by far most of the migrant workers are low-skilled contract workers. In such constellations, the stance
of the labour unions is often ambiguous because they fear fierce competition from migrant workers
and low-paid segments of the labour markets. But they usually also seek to uphold social rights for all
workers and engage in the struggle for non-discrimination against migrant workers. Often, it is the
national-level organizations of unions that are more critical of migrant labour, as distinct from
international and local ones. This observation points to the fact that the national level is where the
issues with respect to identities and securities are politicized. Not surprisingly, non-union forms of
organization have increasingly gained in importance, such as the Philippines-based NGO-network
MIGRANTE International, and transnational advocacy networks such as the Migrant Forum in Asia,
and Coordination of Action Research on AIDS and Mobility, also in Asia, who help in the
organization of workers in places like Hong Kong (Grugel and Piper 2011).

Culturalizing Emigration: Emigrant Nation and Diaspora

Moving to the socio-cultural dimension of processes (Table 9.1), we notice that terms such as
emigrant nation and diaspora have proliferated not only in academic research but also in the self-
description of migrant associations and in the migration politics of emigration and immigration states,
international organizations, and NGOs. Contested concepts such as diaspora refer to communal
relations in the transnational social spaces between emigration and immigration regions in which
manifold transactions occur, including not only geographical movement—emigration, return, in-
between movements, and onward migration—but also various sorts of remittances. Concomitantly, the
transnationality of migrants and their collectives plays a crucial role in issues of remittances and
return. Within transnational social spaces, the various cross-border actors have shifted in their
relevance for linking migration and development. Within such social spaces, diasporas have emerged
as important referents. They may provide common goods and services to domestic populations from
abroad, thus qualifying as external actors, but they also often retain citizenship or a connection to the
place of origin which would qualify them as internal. Meanwhile, states themselves to an increasing
extent harness their own emigrant populations, thus extending conceptualizations of citizenship and
governance beyond traditional spatial boundaries. While the national state is not the sole site of
legitimization, and the local state, entrepreneurs, and civil society have acquired a greater role, the
former’s public sphere is still the site where cross-border migration and transnationality are placed
on the political agenda.
How state–citizen relations in the context of emigration have changed can be gleaned from a
historical sketch. In Europe, during the eighteenth century, following mercantilist reasoning,
emigration countries tried to prohibit out-migration because of fear of treason to the home state or
loss of labour power. In the nineteenth century a utilitarian approach took hold—exporting paupers
abroad, for example from the UK to white settler colonies. It was not until the late nineteenth century
that countries such as Germany and the UK changed the law of citizenship to include citizens abroad
as members of the nation (Green 2005). Nowadays, states work harder than before to maintain a
claim to represent their people, the nation, wherever they may live. Since emigration states have few
chances to effectively exercise coercion vis-à-vis emigrant citizens abroad, there is one major
instrument left: embrace (former) citizens abroad and thus influence their decisions to maintain links,
invest in the country of origin, support it, or even return (for a contemporary case study, see Schir
2018; cf. Kastoryano and Schader 2014). Significantly, the recent expansion of activities vis-à-vis
emigrants marks a change in how at least some states position themselves. Mexico, for example,
reinvented many of the policies Italy and Japan had used a hundred years earlier. In turn, Latin
American governments developed diaspora policies along the example set by Mexico by way of the
mechanism of emulation (Délano Alonso 2018: chapter 3). Narrative inclusion of emigrants in the
stories of ‘us’, the people, is a necessary precondition for institutional developments associated with
emigrant politics and policies, finding expression in terms such as the global nation or the emigrant
nation. This observation is not restricted to classical emigration countries over the past decades, such
as Mexico, the Philippines, or Turkey, but also includes major immigration countries such as the
USA, Germany, or the UK, who have also experienced emigration. If we take this broad view, we
may venture the following proposition: states have developed emigration policies that facilitate the
departure of their people to engage in transnational mobility in certain circumstances since the 1980s
and 1990s—for example, to get rid of surplus population or political dissidents—and try to dissuade
the highly skilled from moving abroad (if not successful, keeping in touch with them or offering
incentives for their return), while they construct stringent immigration policies with regard to
foreigners, non-citizens.
Migrants’ opportunities to voice political views concerning their homelands and to address
concomitant social inequalities changed dramatically after the end of the Cold War. In the 1960s,
lobbying activities of diasporas mainly took the form of protests against the domestic policies of
governments in the homelands (Armstrong 1976). Cold War rivalries largely dictated the
effectiveness of these diasporic anti-government campaigns. During the Cold War, Western countries
maintained fairly open refugee policies compared to the post-Cold War era, and supported diaspora
groups who formed opposition to unfriendly regimes, as was the case, for example, with the US
government’s support of Cuban exile groups. When the Cold War ended, diasporas had to search for
new fields of engagement, and development cooperation surfaced as one of them. This reorientation
roughly coincided with the proclamation by UN institutions of migrants as development agents.
Development has been broadly understood by leading international donors and institutions as
implying primarily economic development, yet to be complemented by the institutionalization of the
rule of law and democracy. Currently, although national liberation diasporas are still functioning,
diasporic activities have become more varied; for example, some diasporas have portrayed
themselves as advocates of human rights. Even in the context of armed conflict and civil wars,
diasporas have assumed a more visible role. Increasingly, diasporas are acknowledged actors in
financial, economic, political, and social support in post-conflict reconstruction, peace-building, and
(re)democratization in their homelands from which they had once fled—as is the case with
Afghanistan. These relations are embedded in a broader shift in the perspectives on conflict held by
development agencies. Conflicts, along with the forced migration movements and diasporas these
often result in, are now seen as an opportunity to rebuild political and economic structures without
carrying the burden of previous malfunctioning institutions, while bringing new concepts and
experiences from stable host countries characterized by the rule of law (for a critique, see Van Hear
2014b).
One may view the regulation of rights and duties of emigrants as an effort by emigration states to
(re)integrate their diasporas into the country of origin through various public policies. Countries of
origin, along with those of destination, have turned into transnational agents themselves, being part of
a wider cross-border maze of political, economic, and cultural fields in education, labour, politics,
science, finance, production, and trade. This is why we need to take a broader perspective to include
the emigration states, as part not only of the international system of states but also of broader societal
networks and social spaces, namely, transnational social spaces. What is called transnational
community or diaspora constitutes a specific form of transnational social space after the Cold War.
Before the Cold War, and indeed for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, governments
exiled opponents in order to quiet political opposition. In turn, exiles and other members of the
diasporas defined themselves in opposition to the prevailing regime in their country of origin. With
the demise of the Cold War, however, the meaning of diaspora changed from security concerns to a
development focus. With this process, NGOs also assumed a greater role. Diaspora has emerged
gradually as a catch-all term which can be used for all ideological predispositions: individualistic
market thinking and network talk (politico-economic), but also collectivistic, essentialized notions of
community (socio-cultural). The successful adoption of the term is a sign that political actors with
very different ideological predispositions read into it whatever they wish. Although concepts very
much akin to diaspora do exist, such as transnational communities, in policy circles this term and
associated concepts such as transnationality and transnational social spaces have probably never
acquired much traction because of the allegedly underlying premise that migrants live between rather
than within sovereign states, and therefore allegedly signify a failure of integration policies. By
contrast, in the migration and development literature, migrants as members of diaspora are cast as
fully integrated members of destination countries who can still play a major role in the development
of countries of origin (see also Portes, Escobar, and Radford 2007). Going beyond this conceptual
shift, the discussion in policy circles has been unabashedly optimistic, expressed by ideas that there
is no really crippling brain drain and instead we have diaspora engagement in development,
expressed through new terms such as brain gain, brain circulation, and brain exchange. After all, it is
not clear whether highly educated and skilled emigrants ‘would have been as productive at home’ (for
a critique of such assumptions, see Delgado Wise, Covarrubias, and Puentes 2013).
Diaspora comes in two main versions: diaspora challenging the constitution of existing national
states or empires, and diaspora as development agents. The first type, which could be called an ‘exo-
polity’ (Dufoix 2003), is a group, usually an ethnic or religious minority group, seeking the right to
national self-determination, engaged in state-seeking nationalism targeted at an existing multi-
ethnic/multi-national empire or state to create a homogeneous national state. Examples are efforts of
Irish emigrants in the USA before 1922, and Sikhs from the Punjab in the USA and Europe before
1949 (e.g. Tatla 1999). More recent examples include Kurds in the case of Turkey, and contiguous
states such as Syria, Iran, and Iraq, especially since the 1980s (with various precursors in the past),
and the abortive efforts of Tamil diaspora fighters with respect to Sri Lanka. Second, and even more
relevant for the transnationalized social question, is the migrant diaspora which is engaged in
development activities.
What the two versions have in common is that mobilization occurs around culturalized
heterogeneities, collective action mostly centred on ethno-national belonging. This phenomenon
stands in contrast to mobilization of migrants abroad around class, as expressed in proletarian
internationalism, which could be found from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in, for
example, the Atlantic migration system linking Europe and the Americas. The roll call for proletarian
internationalism was the last line of The Communist Manifesto (1848), namely, ‘Workers of the
world, unite!’ The diaspora’s activities of the time were predicated on the view that capitalism is a
global system, and therefore the working-class must act as a global class if it is not to be defeated in
class conflict. Clearly, class politics was connected to status; nevertheless, the claim was to unite
workers across ethnic and national boundaries (see Chapter 2). Historically, labour internationalism
and home-country allegiances, class, and ethnicity or nationality seemed to be compatible
(Hobsbawm 1988). One striking form could be observed in the USA during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries: the dominant heterogeneity for mobilization at work was class, while in
neighbourhood politics it was ethnicity (Katznelson 1981). All of this is to say that working-class
migrant activists were not rootless proletarians in that they were neither here nor there; rather, they
made choices as to which heterogeneities would apply to which societal field. It seems that, since
then, internationalism has given way to nationalism. Interestingly, a faint resemblance can be
discerned with respect to Islamic internationalists along with the tradition of transnationalism in
worldwide organizations such as the Catholic Church. In the case of Islam the relevant community is
not a particular ethnicity but umma, the worldwide community of Muslim believers, beyond people
and place (Mandaville 2001). Cross-border political movements of Islam have been a challenge to
existing emigration states, and in their most militant form have contributed to the displacement of
existing political regimes in the Middle East. In the case of the Catholic Church it is the community of
believers, undergirded by a common institutional structure, which has transgressed political borders
for two millennia. The self-understanding of the Catholic Church, in contrast to Protestant Churches,
is one of a world church or global church. In this latter case numerous transnational transactions can
be found between congregations in different countries, encompassing the global North and the global
South (Pasura and Erdal 2016).
Diaspora, as a concept used by political activists and analysed as a social construct with real
consequences by social scientists, usually revolves around a specific set of markers, normally
ethnicity and/or nationality. In exceptional cases, some interpretations of the transnational identity
may be detached from a national identity and thus compete with statist transnationalism, as in the idea
of a Jewish diaspora not centred on the state of Israel but in a global diaspora (Boyarin and Boyarin
1993). In its dominant uses, by emphasizing ethnicity or nationality, political activists occlude other
markers involved in social practices, such as transnationality, gender, sexual orientation, or legal
status. The term these days is often invoked by nationalist groups speaking for such imagined
collectives and trying to push nation-building, or by governments tapping into the resources of ‘their’
emigrants abroad, controlling them or protecting ethnic minorities living in another state. As noted
earlier, in more recent times, source countries of migration have also used diaspora to encourage
financial investments and promote political loyalty among economically successful expatriates (Shain
2005). Also relevant is how researchers deal with this process. When they simply follow the claims
made by political activists, they fall into the trap of the one-dimensional characterization of migrants
as members of ethnic and national groups, while migrants may also be adherents of religious
communities, sports clubs, and professional associations—all potentially relevant for the politics
around social inequalities. This insight should not lead us to merely deconstruct the discursive uses of
diaspora but to inquire into the conditions for mobilization around the culturalized heterogeneities of
ethnicity and nation across borders.
In general, it is helpful to understand diaspora as the contingent outcome of political mobilizations
within transnational social spaces. Emigrants have various ways of exerting voice from abroad in
their countries of origin: lobbying family members, community leaders, or public officials to support
particular candidates, political parties, initiatives, or policies; making financial contributions to
political campaigns or causes; mobilizing for and exercising diaspora political rights, most commonly
in the form of expatriate voting and migrant representation in local legislatures; or using collective
remittances as leverage to induce local governments to invest in collective goods and/or alter their
styles of governance. All four types of collective action are related to the politics around inequalities.
Yet, it is mostly the fourth type that is relevant for social protection. Social protection across borders
is provided, above all, by transnational communities (such as village communities), or kinship groups
(such as families).
To conclude, diaspora in its current use and practice, and more than ever before, carries the
connotation of simultaneity across borders. One may go so far as to claim that the connotation of
diaspora has moved from double absence to double presence in the emigration and immigration
contexts, at least symbolically. A prime example is certain forms of political rights and engagement,
often by those migrants privileged with material and semantic resources (Chaudhary and Moss 2016;
Portes, Escobar, and Radford 2007). It is, above all, those migrants with relatively high amounts of
cultural, financial, and social capital who are engaged politically across borders in practices which
go beyond family affairs. Dual citizenship is its legal expression. In many cases, it permits activation
of participation in one country at a time, depending on residence; going beyond consecutive
simultaneity is a more direct form, for example, expatriate voting rights. It also helps to enforce the
provision of collective goods in areas such as health and education in favour of relatively privileged
groups in places of origin.

The Politics around Emigration and Return

In order to discuss the politics around development, market liberalization, securitization, and
transnationalization, it is helpful to take a look at the perceptions associated with the integration of
emigrants and return migrants. Emigration may refer to various migrant types, such as forced migrants,
return migrants, or circular migrants. In this context, it is useful to return to the typology used earlier
for immigration constellations (see Chapter 8). Again, also for emigration contexts, four basic
subtypes are possible (Table 9.2): integration, discrimination, toleration, and exclusion.3
Table 9.2. Wanted and/or welcome (again)

Welcome again/ Cultural recognition Wanted/Economic Demand

Yes No
Yes Integration (1) Toleration (3)
e.g. highly skilled return migrants; e.g. victims in immigration countries,
migrants remitting to or investing in without sought-after human, social,
country of origin or financial capital
No Discrimination (2) Exclusion (4)
e.g. ‘backward’ labour migrants; e.g. challengers to the emigration
minorities state, long-distance nationalists

(1) Politics and policies around integration—directed at those emigrants and return migrants who are
economically wanted and culturally welcome—refer to various categories of mobile persons, such as
highly skilled return migrants but also to emigrants remitting to or investing in their country of origin,
and those highly skilled residing abroad who cooperate with partners in countries of origin, such as
scientists (on the latter, see Kuznetsov 2006). It is clear that the politics and policies of integration in
emigration states focus on those emigrants with high amounts of financial and human capital in order
to garner these resource potentials. One of the tangible ways in which emigration states do this, in the
realm of non-state organizations, is to establish new migrant associations, such as Amicales in the
case of Morocco, or ‘Diaspora Knowledge Networks’ in the cases of South Africa and Colombia (J.-
B. Meyer 2011). One of the purposes of such practices is to control a loyal diaspora and to include it
within a national community. These policies and politics are meant to integrate the mentioned
emigrant categories as firmly as possible into the (global) emigrant nation. Above all, it is in this case
that we can speak of simultaneity in integration: those with high amounts of material and cultural
capital are the ones who are likely to be actively involved across borders in ways going beyond
family relations, such as leadership roles in NGOs or in political parties.
As to concrete integration efforts bringing together various instruments, the most well-known
example is the Philippines. In 2007, a quarter of the labour force was working abroad and
remittances accounted for 13 per cent of GDP (Ruiz 2008). The POEA and various other agencies
under the supervision of the labour and the foreign affairs ministries seek to regulate recruitment,
deployment, and social protection. For example, POEA monitors private recruitment agencies, and
offers information on jobs abroad through websites. With respect to deployment, various agencies
offer seminars on working and living conditions in the country of destination. As to social protection,
there is an institutionalized welfare fund—a public assistance programme—offered through the
Overseas Workers Welfare Administration. In addition, all these policies are embedded in political
rights, such as the acceptance of dual citizenship. This means that Filipino citizens acquiring a new
citizenship abroad do not need to renounce their Filipino citizenship. Moreover, there are provisions
for absentee voting, that is, voting from abroad.
(2) There is also discrimination directed at those who, from the perspective of the respective
political regimes or ruling elites, are economically wanted but do not fully belong. Despite all the
talk of the shift from emigrants as ‘traitors’ to ‘our heroes abroad’, there are those who are not
perceived as full members in the legal and, above all, cultural sense. Here we may refer to labour
migrants who belong to beleaguered ethnic or religious minorities in the emigration country. In
addition, among those not particularly welcome are return migrants who challenge the status quo, such
as émigré political groups critical of human rights violations (see also type (4): exclusion). In such
cases the financial remittances of some of them are clearly welcome as long as they flow to families
and not into secession projects. The import of political ideas certainly is most unwelcome in many
authoritarian regimes. While most research holds that financial remittances have a pernicious effect
on politics by contributing to authoritarian stability, there is also evidence from selected African
countries to the contrary: remittances increase political protest in authoritarian states by augmenting
the resources available to potential political opponents (Escribà-Folch, Meseguer, and Wright 2017).
Especially for those emigrant categories experiencing discrimination by the authorities in their
countries of origin, the strategy of voicing interests from abroad is deeply attractive. In other words,
there is some evidence that voice from abroad is more effective than voice upon return. This applies
to contentious religious politics around Islam (see Chapter 8). Again, remittances play a crucial role.
In short, migrants are likely to exert an influence on their local communities or even countries of
origin, whereas this influence often diminishes upon return (Meseguer and Burgess 2014).
Migrants may use transnational ties and turn to supranational and international bodies to advance
their interests and further their goals in the country of origin. For example, migrant organizations are
established in countries of immigration which engage in networking and promotion of public affairs in
migrants’ places of origin (Pilati and Morales 2016). In the countries of origin, however, such efforts
are seen critically and sometimes curbed. A noteworthy example is the Turkish Alevi organizations,
which have sprung up in various European countries. While these started out predominantly as
supporters of social democratic parties in the countries of immigration, they eventually evolved into
associations defined by the Alevi belief system and expanded back into Turkey (Jørgensen 2011). By
the same token, immigration countries also find certain organizations run from abroad to be
questionable. For example, membership organizations have been established in countries of
emigration and engage in transactions across borders, such as the Islamic organization Milli Görüş,
which originated in Turkey but has extended into such European countries as Germany and the
Netherlands (Carkoğlu and Rubin 2006).
(3) Toleration is a type which refers to those emigrants or circular migrants who are not really
needed economically but are welcome in a cultural sense. In this category, we would expect to find
return migrants without sought-after cultural, social, or financial capital. Yet there may be a sense of
belonging shared by return migrants and non-migrants. A prototypical instance would be those
migrants whose (re)admission has been based on ancestry in the context of persecution abroad, such
as re-settlers in Eastern Europe in the case of Germany and Greece (e.g. Peleikis 2009: 170). There
is a thin line between this and the fourth type, exclusion.
(4) Exclusion connotes the type of politics and policies referring to those not needed
economically and who are certainly problematic from the point of view of the emigration state with
respect to national-cultural homogeneity. A clear case in point for securitization is challengers to the
emigration state, such as long-distance nationalists. Challenger diasporas such as the Kurdish
activists in Sweden or Germany with respect to Turkey are examples of such groups.

Outlook: Diaspora as Shifting Responsibility to Migrants

Only by placing the discussion in the wider context of the migration–development nexus is it possible
to understand the new importance of diaspora and transnational communities with respect to the
transnationalized social question. The policy prominence of the role of migration for economic
development since the early 2000s has been fed by the portrayal of migrants as development agents
thanks to their concomitant resources—financial remittances. This has been part of a combined focus
on marketization and the growing influence of civil society in development discourse and policies.
The claims that migration is one of the central keys to remove structural constraints to economic
growth, improve social well-being, and foster stronger democracy were overblown, to say the least.
With respect to the politico-cultural dimension, the term diaspora has experienced a renaissance.
Diaspora organizations certainly are influenced by and often skilfully employ global meta-norms and
slogans such as ‘a nation for each people’, democracy, human rights, and gender equality—and yet
remain embedded in local discourses. Cross-border activists come close to being ‘embedded
cosmopolitans’ (Tarrow 2005), who are both here and there, entertaining manifold cross-border
threads of interaction. The change in function of diasporas from a tool in the Cold War between
superpowers to development agents, and the change of policies of emigration countries to woo
emigrants abroad, has rekindled the ethno-national and sometimes religious character of diaspora. In
a way, the securitized and culturalized version of emigration in diaspora has been a mirror image of
neo-nationalist and nativist currents in immigration countries.
The foregoing reflections on the role of emigration states in seeking to control migrants’
transnational agency lead to further questions. An important one is related to the growing importance
of market-liberalist understandings of the role of governments and the related transfer of
responsibilities for problem-solving to migrants, individual actors, and diaspora as collective actors.
This idea has most recently been discussed with respect to the framing of migration as adaptation in
the context of climate change (Bettini and Gioli 2016).

Notes
1. The agenda centred its intervention on three Asian countries (the Philippines, India, and Vietnam), with substantial outflow of health
care professionals and which, at the same time, were actively pursuing cooperative agreements on sending health care professionals
to various recruiters in Europe and North America.
2. Leblang (2015) used macro-level evidence for a large panel of countries over the period 1980–2009, and micro-level data from
migrant surveys carried out in a variety of host countries.
3. See also the threefold distinction by Xiang who distinguishes among victims (e.g. refugees), desired (e.g. investors), and the
ambivalents, such as irregular migrants without formal training (Xiang 2013: 11). His distinction focuses on outcomes rather than
mechanisms.
Part IV
Future Directions

Part IV places the foregoing discussion in the realm of future engagement, both with respect to
research and to the public role of social scientists. Chapter 10 deals with how the transnationalized
social question is to be seen in light of environmental destruction and climate change as a socio-
natural or socio-ecological question in what has been called the new geological formation, the
Anthropocene. The dire scenarios of the impact of environmental destruction are already a feature of
the present era, visible above all in the rising number of internally displaced persons. The erosion of
ecological foundations thus strengthens inequalities not only between the global South and the global
North but also within. Interestingly, the shifting of responsibilities for development and social
protection from governments to migrants is also visible in the climate change debate. For example,
the interpretation of notions such as adaptation (and even more so, resilience) have emphasized the
responsibility of those affected by climate change. Yet the focus on the ‘resilient migrant’ has tended
to occlude the effects of climate change on social inequalities. Also, scholars have not fully dealt
with the analogy between the exploitation of humans by humans and the exploitation of nature by
capitalism.
Chapter 11 then shifts the perspective and examines more generally the role played by social
scientists in portraying the transnationalized social question in the public sphere. Politics around
social inequalities and social protection often raise the question in what ways social scientists may
advise policy-making and thus contribute to designing better policies. Such a question, however, is
ultimately misleading. The most important role of social science is to offer concepts and patterns of
interpretations which can guide political debates in the public sphere.
10

The Socio-Natural Question

The Future is the Present

Ever since its first formulation, the social question has been intricately connected to the ecological
question—Karl Marx’s writings may just be the most conspicuous example. In his discussion of
surplus value in the first volume of Das Kapital, Marx concludes that capitalist production can only
accumulate capital by undermining the two sources of societal wealth, that is, the earth and the
worker (Marx 1962 [1867]: 528–30). By contrast, he imagines the future of humanity towards the end
of the third volume of Das Kapital as one in which exchange with nature is regulated by rational
criteria instead of being mastered by blind fate (Marx 1964 [1894]: 828). One may object that Karl
Marx was one of the most fervent adherents of economic modernization which has led to large-scale
environmental destruction. Notwithstanding this criticism, we seem to be more distant than ever from
the vision of reconciling nature and culture. At any rate, this discussion raises the overall question of
how ecology and culture relate with respect to the social consequences of degradation and
destruction, in particular, social inequalities. Against this background the main empirical questions
are: what impact do social inequalities in the context of climate change have on migration and how
does migration (re)produce such inequalities? Which mechanisms are operative?
The argument here is that the Anthropocene is characterized not just by a social question—the
conflict between capital and labour in the nineteenth century, or induced by manifold heterogeneities
such as ethnicity, race, gender, religion, or age—but by a socio-natural question. In other words, we
are confronted not only with the dynamics and consequences of the exploitation of humans by humans
as the decisive social mechanism. Instead, this basic mechanism is complemented by and intersects
with the exploitation of nature by humans through over-extraction and the consequences this kind of
exploitation has for ecological systems, social relations, and social inequalities. In order to capture
this impact, cross-border migration is a field in which to observe how inequalities in the context of
the global South and global North play out and are reinforced. So far, two generations of scholarship
have discussed the climate change–migration debate in a rather narrow framework, without
considering in full that climate change is mainly an add-on to environmental destruction. The first
generation dealt with vulnerability, the second with adaptation and resilience. These perspectives
have occluded the effects of environmental destruction on different categories of people with respect
to social inequalities. Hence we need a third generation which devotes more attention to how
responses to climate change, including migration as adaptation, are implicated in reproducing existing
social stratification.
 The first part of the analysis outlines the discussion on climate change and migration; the second
develops the concept of the socio-natural question; the third is devoted to tracing the two previous
generations in the climate change–migration debate, and vulnerability and resilience, and goes beyond
this state of research by introducing a social inequality perspective. The fourth part details the nexus
between migration and inequalities in the context of climate change, followed by a concluding part on
perspectives for further research.

Climate Change and Migration

Currently, the environmentally displaced across the globe amount to about 42 million people, and of
them 17 million are cross-border refugees (Wihtol de Wenden 2016a). It is not by coincidence that
violent conflicts are thought to be produced in the context of climate change (Wodon et al. 2014),
partly driven, for example, by conflicts around scarce resources such as water and pastoral land in
the global South. Environmentally induced migration is definitely one of the drivers of South–South
and South–North migration. The crucial mechanism inducing environmental migration as one
important driver of forced migration is extraction of resources from territories, which is an extension
of the extraction of energy from humans, or exploitation. Extraction of natural resources and
exploitation of human beings have been intertwined over the past few hundred years. Overall, nature
has been regarded in industrialized and industrializing society as the ‘other’ of culture and society, as
an obstacle to be overcome. It has been regarded as a storehouse for resources to be plundered, and
with grave consequences. Over the past half-century, for example, while global population has
doubled, consumption of potable water has tripled, water has been pumped from aquifers which have
run dry, and the prerequisites for decent living have been depleted (World Water Council 2017).
Nature in the sense of this understanding of resources is very much limited while capitalism is
insatiable in consuming these resources. In other words, extraction has created an ecological rift
between limited natural resources on the one hand and limitless consumption of these resources for
production on the other. This was the message of the first report of the Club of Rome in the early
1970s (Meadows et al. 1972); and although the predictions as to when certain resources such as oil
would be depleted turned out to be incorrect, the message about this tension still holds today (Turner
2014).
Consequences of this fundamental rift can already be seen today—environmentally induced
displacement is now in full swing and not a remote future scenario. Underlying climate change is the
large-scale destruction of human habitat. The number of people newly displaced within states has
averaged more than five million a year over the past decade, and the number of those displaced by
disaster has reached more than twenty million (IDMC 2016). Research and public attention focus
mostly on violent conflicts as causes of forced migration, and there is certainly no denying that high-
intensity civil wars and protracted conflicts are major drivers of migration. Nevertheless, as the
numbers suggest, deteriorating environmental conditions—partially an outcome of climate change and
the extractionism underlying this change—are one major driver among others. Such environmental
conditions themselves may even turn into drivers of violent conflicts, associated most often with other
factors such as the intervention of external actors in processes of land grabbing (Sassen 2014). The
primacy of the extractive logic in such cases has clear implications for social inequalities. As if the
logic of indebtedness of countries dominated by extractive economies were not enough, nowadays the
devastation of large economic sectors through an extractive logic also destroys social strata such as
the middle classes in parts of the global South. This partly goes contrary to the more general
development of an emerging middle class in selected countries, for example in India and China (cf.
Kharas 2017). Financialization is part of this extractive logic: it adds to an extractionist logic in the
global South through speculation with raw materials, to a shrinking state sector, and thus to austerity
policies for the countries of the global North.
Land grabbing can serve as an example of these considerations. In The Great Transformation,
Karl Polanyi identified three ‘fictitious commodities’: labour (life in general), soil, and money
(Polanyi 2001 [1944]). First, life pertains to the distribution of the social costs of (re)production, for
example, by way of public provision of social welfare, health, education, housing, and employment—
and has been dealt with in most parts of this book. Second, soil refers to ecological challenges and
associated risks. This is considered here with respect to migration in the context of and sometimes
even directly driven by environmental degradation in general and climate change in particular. Yet,
unlike the land enclosures Marx and Polanyi wrote about, which marketized already existing socio-
natural realities, the new enclosures of today penetrate deep inside ecological systems, altering their
internal functioning. Finally, market liberalism is a stage of an economic long cycle which is
characterized by financialization (Mason 2015). This also applies to environmental regulation.
Witness, for example, the trade in carbon permits and other ‘environmental derivatives’, which divert
capital from the investment needed to expand renewable energy sources. One may argue that this
assault on what remains of the ecological commons is turning the natural condition of capital
accumulation into another central node of economic or even capitalist crisis.
For a long time in the second part of the twentieth century, such a sober view of the impact of the
capitalist economy was non-existent in the social sciences. The dominant view was a specific
interpretation of Durkheim’s Division of Labour (1964a [1893]), namely, that growing
interdependence in society—within and across borders of national states—was conducive to
advancing social solidarity. One expression of this idea in the Anglo-Saxon world was T. H.
Marshall’s concept of social citizenship which signalled driving forces toward social equality, while
in the German-speaking world the notion of the ‘social market economy’ (Müller-Armack 1978) has
stood for this optimistic strand of reconciling democracy and capitalism towards greater
distributional equality—an imagination of redistributive justice. The underlying functionalist
assumption was that continuous economic growth would iron out gross social inequalities and create
some sort of affluence for all, at least in (post-)industrial societies (e.g. Gouldner 1971). Yet, while
an integral part of it, the ecological question goes beyond distributional issues in that it concerns the
quality and the survival of human life as such.
Climate change as part of environmental destruction is difficult to pin down for empirical
analysis. The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an
expert group documenting and accounting for climate change, defined climate change-related
migration as ‘human migration where environmental risks or environmental change plays a significant
role in influencing the migration decision and destination’ (Agard and Schipper 2016: 1765). It must
be acknowledged, though, that concepts such as climate migrant, or environmental or climate change
refugees are contested because they do not constitute legal categories (Milan et al. 2016). Two of the
reasons for this are that it is conceptually quite difficult to separate environmental from other drivers
of migration such as economic motives and violent conflicts (Schmidt-Verkerk 2012), and that
migration theories so far have paid little attention to the environment (Piguet 2013).
Debates have emerged on the interlinkages of different migration drivers. In academia and policy-
making discourses since the early 1990s environmental stressors have been discussed as drivers of
migration (Myers and Kent 1995). In many of these early publications, a linear and positive
relationship between environmental change and migration has been assumed. The debate on climate
change and migration has been fuelled and sustained by repeated dire scenarios with respect to the
numbers of persons who will allegedly be displaced in the decades to come. The figures range from
200 million to 700 million ‘climate refugees’ by 2050 (e.g. Christian Aid 2007). Climate change ‘is
attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere
and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods’
(UNFCCC 1992: 3). While direct and linear relationships between climate change in particular and
environmental degradation in general are problematic, the correlation as such and the imputed
causality are scientifically undisputed. Since the late 1980s, the Assessment Reports of the IPCC have
been part of the scientific construct of the consensus, and this consensus has remained relatively
stable over time with respect to one key factor: the sensitivity of the climate to atmospheric CO2
increase (and other gases such as methane), expressed as a projected increase of global mean
temperature. Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence suggesting a positive correlation between the
size of migration flows between 172 countries on the one hand, and measures of overfishing,
desertification, water scarcity, soil salinization, deforestation, air pollution, soil erosion, and
concomitant pollution, on the other (Faist and Schade 2013). Here, the negative effects of climate
change are seen as a special instance of environmental degradation. The latter also encompasses
processes which are not causally and directly related to global warming: for instance, the impacts of
development projects such as dam-building come to mind.
The estimates of numbers of environmentally displaced persons can be seen as over-simplistic
and based on unsound assumptions (Black et al. 2011). In line with this criticism, academic
understandings of the relationship between climate change and migration have become more nuanced,
acknowledging its complex nature, resulting in different potential outcomes including forced
displacement, migration as an adaptive strategy to climate stressors, and people becoming trapped in
areas affected by climate change (Foresight 2011). In contrast, in many policy-making reports and
also in public debates, there is still a stronger focus on the threat of climate change as a direct driver
of forced mass migration.
There is a general and long-established academic consensus that climate change in many parts of
the world will have negative effects on socio-economic development, particularly in rural areas of
countries in spaces 3 and 4 (Chapter 4; Yamin, Rahman, and Huy 2005). As shown in the example of
migration to the EU, this consensus in climate change research is based on the consideration that
multiple and sequential causes lead to situations which involve different social dynamics and finally
result in conflicts and human flight. It has been argued in this regard that climatic factors in Syria in
the early 2010s led first to worsening rural conditions and then to rural–urban migration (Kelley et al.
2015). Mass internal migration in combination with inadequate political responses led to issues
affecting urban areas, such as unemployment and weak social protection measures, and eventually
helped to stoke unrest among different population segments.
One of the difficulties of dissecting the environment–migration linkage is the complex trend of
climate change itself. For example, migration in this context can result from slow-onset degradation
and rapid-onset change. An example of slow-onset degredation can be observed in many of the
Pacific Island states over past decades (e.g. Shen and Gemenne 2011). Yet we have also observed
massive rapid-onset disasters. Examples include the increased frequency of flooding of many river
delta cities, for example in Bangladesh (Etzold et al. 2016).
 Slow-onset degradation may have much more drastic effects in the future, which is why it is
important to consider the degradation paradox (see also Giddens 2009). This paradox states that the
dangerous effects of climate change are not immediately visible in our daily lives. Therefore, many
groups and organizations will do nothing about it until the consequences become drastic. By that time
it might be too late, either to mitigate climate change or to adapt creatively by using new forms of
organization and technology. We could compare this situation to that faced by an individual smoker.
Smokers usually are aware that their habit is dangerous, but most of the damage is done before they
begin to experience the negative health effects, so they do not give up the habit until it is too late. This
degradation paradox has important implications for migration research.
Whether looking at slow-onset or rapid-onset climate drivers, migration studies are at their best
when seeking to understand the internal dynamics of movement across borders and to apply concepts
capturing endogenous (self-driven) dynamics, such as cumulative causation and relative deprivation
(Chapter 3). This line of work certainly must continue. However, migration research now has to
consider much more than before how previously exogenous factors such as climate change become
endogenized in mobility processes, that is, how people and organizations seek to deal with the
transformation of their socio-natural environments, and the differential impact on the categories of
people affected.
Market liberalization and securitization are master processes involved in the politics around
climate change and environmental degradation. With respect to climate change, it is obvious that the
poorer parts of the world’s population are affected most—and the majority of these live in the global
South. What has been termed anthropogenic climate change exerts itself as a sort of ecological force
upon those most vulnerable. In line with market liberalization, more and more responsibilities have
been heaped upon individuals cast as interest-maximizing and autonomous actors. Cross-border
migration to escape these predicaments is an exit option for some, albeit climate change is often not
the only driver—lack of economic prospects is often part of the process. It is in this way that
migration brings home to the global North the joint outcome of environmental destruction, climate
change, and market liberalization. The effects of these processes ignore human-made borders and
boundaries.

The Socio-Natural Question in the Anthropocene

The idea underlying many a discussion on climate change and migration seems to be that nature and
culture can be neatly separated. This is a false dichotomy, however. It is more useful to construct it as
a nexus. The nature–culture division and the assumed mechanistic, unilineal response are untenable
for at least two reasons. First, we as humans have altered the very climate we live in; hence the
chemist Paul Crutzen in the 1990s popularized the term Anthropocene which implies that humans have
become a geological force (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007). Second, the hazards associated with
climate change are experienced differently by various groups of people. In short, there are differential
vulnerabilities. This becomes clear if we look at the social inequalities involved in environmental
degradation and people affected. It can be seen as a sort of cross-over relationship. For example,
although greenhouse gas emissions cannot be stopped by national border patrols, the consequences
for social inequalities are highly uneven. The poorer sections of the world’s population, that is, those
who have contributed least to global warming, are hit the worst (UNDP 2007/8). However, as we
know from decades of research into cross-border migration, it is not the poorest strata of societal
units who are most likely to engage in cross-border migration (Ahmed 1997). This means that the
relationship between migration induced by climate change and the associated social inequalities need
to be complemented by a perspective on mutually constitutive socio-natural drivers.
Such an approach requires departure from a long-cherished assumption about human
exceptionalism, especially in the discipline of sociology. During much of the twentieth century,
sociologists upheld the idea that humans entertain a dualistic relationship with the environment, being
subject to physical and biological limits and yet being unique in having the capacity for culture and
symbolic communication. This is the background against which sociological assumptions about social
facts need to be placed. Not surprisingly, it is one of the central tenets of this discipline that the cause
of a social fact must always be found in other social, as opposed to, for example, psychological,
facts. Pioneered by one of sociology’s founding figures, this ‘objective reality of social facts’
(Durkheim 1964b [1895]) trumps all efforts to bring in natural factors. This perspective prevents
discussion of facts other than purely social ones, and thus leads to rejections or at least
underestimations of biological and physical facts, and objections to research into the confluence of
biological, physical, and social factors. One of the noteworthy consequences of this state of affairs is
that, even nowadays, there is a widespread belief in sociology that the biophysical environment can
be ignored. This tenet is also connected to beliefs about the exceptional nature of the human species.
Yet, as climate change is teaching us, humans are definitely not exempt from ecological constraints,
although—or perhaps because—we manipulate ecological principles. Clearly, it is important to
reject such ‘exemptionalism’ (Dunlap and Catton 1979) in migration research, too, and bring in what
one could call socio-natural or socio-ecological facts.
Two steps need to be taken to overcome the exemptionalism perspective. The first is to look at the
mutual interaction of nature on the one hand and culture on the other. We find such approaches, at least
implicitly, in the writings of Karl Marx who dealt with the mutual transformation of nature and culture
in the process of capitalism, and hinted at the ruthless exploitation of nature by humans. Yet this
conceptualization still speaks of nature and society as two distinct entities. And, therefore, a second
step is in order. If it is plausible to assume that nature and culture are mutually constitutive, then we
can posit, for example, that humans are part of their socio-natural environment by breathing in air
which in turn enables life and change, which determines their positions in time and space. In turn,
social transactions shape how humans deal with their natural environment. The social consequences
of nature–culture interactions can then be analysed in more adequate ways.

Three Generations of the Climate Change–Migration Debate

The nature–culture nexus has thus far traversed two full generations of scholarship—and a third
generation standing on the shoulders of the second is needed. The first generation of scholarship on
the climate change–migration nexus in the 1980s until the early 2000s focused on the idea of the
environmental refugee who is vulnerable to slow-onset and rapid-onset climate forcing. The most
prominent definition is that of environmental refugees as ‘those people who have been forced to leave
their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption
(natural and/or triggered by people) that jeopardized their existence and/or seriously affect[ed] the
quality of their life’ (El-Hinnawi 1985). This definition did fit well into an alarmist and quite
maximalist perspective in which deleterious consequences of climate change threaten livelihoods and
state security, and lead to armed conflicts—which, in turn, produce more migration. Thus the most
popular scenarios predicted that environmental changes and disasters would force millions of people
to flee their homes (Myers and Kent 1995). According to this line of argument, environmental
pressure leads to land competition, encroachment on ecologically fragile areas, and impoverishment.
These events in turn cause political and ethnic conflicts which precipitate violence and war, often the
immediate motive of flight. As a result, millions of refugees are forced to leave their country and are
supposed to claim asylum in developed countries, or enter as undocumented migrants. And those
persons who escape to nearby countries may be perceived as a challenge to social cohesion and
national identity by the dominant groups.
Most of these considerations are more or less common sense—as sea water levels rise, or forests
disappear, it seems obvious that people will have to move. Yet, there is abundant evidence that this
simple causal chain from degradation to conflict and migration may be too simplistic. One obvious
objection is that deteriorating climatic conditions are rarely the sole cause of displacement and
emigration. Usually, migration is a practice associated with multiple causes and drivers—in this case
at the intersection of natural conditions and the perception that economic and political conditions are
more favourable to life chances abroad. In other words, there are always multiple causes and drivers
of (forced) migration. Even in a limiting case such as Bangladesh, which often serves as the
quintessential example of environmental displacement, we find complex causes for impoverishment
and flight, including land ownership patterns, ethnic divisions, and economic development projects.
Migration researchers were also quick to point out that exogenous factors, unless of an overwhelming
nature such as floods or volcano eruptions, rarely lead to the massive and direct mechanical response
of exit. Even on many Pacific island states, where the threat of inundation looms large in the
perception of the inhabitants, drivers other than climate change, for example, economic opportunities
abroad, are an equally strong predictor for migration (Fornalé, Guélat, and Piguet 2016).
In general, this first generation of approaches lacked a firm embedding of environmentally induced
migration into the political economy of extraction and exploitation. What we know for certain is that
vulnerability and also exposure to the consequences of climate change are highest in regions and
communities that are economically defined as extractive economies (characterized, for example, by
exploitation of raw materials), tightly connected with weak institutionalization of civil society,
especially high income and wealth inequalities, and have a relatively low degree of press freedom
(Roberts and Parks 2007).
Nonetheless, the first generation of discussion which placed the concept of vulnerability at the
centre fulfilled a very important function for research in pointing to a glaring gap in migration
theorizing. Migration theories, which have been developed mostly with reference to relatively
voluntary migration and not explicitly considering the aspect of threat and high risk, have tended to
portray migration decisions primarily as a proactive strategy aimed at improving life chances. This
view is common to otherwise very different theories, including not only neo-classical individual
choice models but also collective choice approaches such as the NELM and sociological-
anthropological livelihood approaches. Moreover, most climate-induced migration has been part of
on-going mobility processes, a sort of collective path dependency in established migration systems or
migration corridors. In brief, it was mostly environmental research that dramatized the nexus in
suggesting very high numbers of potential migrants, whereas migration researchers pointed to the
ubiquity of mobility and the observation that slow-onset climate-induced migration did fit into
established migration patterns (Castles 2001). After all, established international migration streams
recently have not encompassed much more than 3 per cent of the world’s population.
The discussion within the first generation of scholarship was premised on the policy idea of
mitigating climate change. As it became increasingly obvious in this new millennium that global
warming would proceed even if drastic mitigation measures were taken, the discourse on the nexus
also gradually began to change. In this second generation, adaptation and the protection of human
security occupy the agenda in research and policy. Research on adaptation has concluded that people
could adjust to changing climatic and environmental situations in order to moderate the harmful
effects of climate change. In the words of the IPCC, it is ‘the process of adjustment to actual or
expected climate and its effects. In human systems, adaptation seeks to moderate harm or exploit
beneficial opportunities’ (IPCC 2014: 5).
Proposals for adaptation have come in two versions, either in-situ adaptation, such as flood
control and crop adjustment, or internal and international migration, including resettlement. These
proposals have in common the notion that it is not just mechanical response and adjustment to climate
change but active intervention by humans which is at the core of adaptation (cf. Simonet 2010). To
legitimize this changing perspective, migration theories have begun to play a greater role not only in
climate change research but also in policy-making, although not as great a role compared to
environmental research and environmental activism that has continuously publicized the scandalous
consequences of climate change. Nonetheless, the reports of the IPCC show that insights from
migration research have become more significant in discussions of possible available responses. In
particular, approaches such as NELM and the livelihood approach have started to play a prominent
role in this emerging and consolidating adaptation narrative. These approaches assert that (potential)
migrants respond to risk by exerting agency, thus playing on a cherished notion in migration research
that spatial mobility is often proactive, not just reactive. For example, NELM portrays the migration
decision as a response to the inability to obtain formal insurance, or as a way to diversify income,
using migration as an informal loan arrangement. There is also the livelihood approach, which
observes inequalities in resource availability and spread, and migration, again, as a way to diversify
income sources via remittances.
Another change is also apparent in this second generation of scholarship. Security is not seen
solely as state-related but as a human element, a counterweight to the former. Human security has
come to be defined as ‘a condition that exists when the vital core of human lives is protected, and
when people have the freedom and capacity to live with dignity’ (IPCC 2014: 759). Human security
is usually associated with another fashionable term, resilience. It is the resilient migrant who has
emerged as the ideal-typical figure fitting the person who adapts. In the terminology used by the
Foresight Report (2011), the resilient migrant who is mobile and preferably entrepreneurial in forging
her or his fate under adverse conditions is engaged in ‘transformative adaptation’, the opposite being
mere ‘incremental adaptation’. In terms of bio-politics and as a concept of practice, one may interpret
the figure of the resilient migrant as the market-liberal incarnation of the contemporary migrant
(Bettini 2014).
Overall, the use of resilience as a strategy to accommodate climate change is tightly connected to
the main ideas of the migration–development–security nexus. Relying on their own resources,
migrants produce benefits which are allegedly advantageous to those left behind, especially family
members, and even collectively. This is very similar to the idea of migrants as development agents in
the recent migration–development debate, instigated by the World Bank in the early 2000s. The main
mechanisms to achieve the ‘triple win’ for migrants and their significant others (including
communities of origin), emigration countries, and immigration states, are financial and social
remittances (see also Chapters 7 and 9). This means that, ultimately, the migrants themselves are
responsible for managing adaptation to climate change, letting governments and international
organizations off the hook. Interestingly, the third element of the nexus—control and state security—is
rarely mentioned in discussions on how migrants in the face of climate change are supposed to
contribute to the welfare of those left behind. Securitization as remote control by the EU in areas such
as Central Africa serves to curb migration and thus the flow of remittances.
As this discussion indicates, we are in need of a third generation of scholarship, building directly
upon the second one. Overall, while the idea of adaptation as proactive agency is practically useful
and borne out by empirical evidence (IPCC 2007), the concept of resilience is deeply biased toward
blaming the victims (migrants) and should be discarded. A step forward or even a new generation
needs to take into account more than ever the observation that adaptation to adverse climatic changes
(re)produces social structural features and those of social stratification, namely social inequalities.
One strong and consolidated finding is that those lacking power, status, and resources, and who are
thus relatively disadvantaged with respect to these criteria, are most vulnerable to the deleterious
effects of climate change (McLeman, Schade, and Faist 2016). Considering the broader context in
which climate-related migration is occurring, it is quite relevant that the main producers of climate
changes with negative effects on the life chances of people are geographically and socially separate
from those who are most affected. And those most affected respond in various ways. Perceptions of
these responses are lopsided, however. Most research and public attention in OECD countries
focuses on those groups that are able to engage in international migration. Yet cross-border migration
usually requires more resources than internal migration or some sort of in-situ adjustment. Very little
attention is given to those people who are displaced within states and those who are despondent and
destitute, unable to move even though they very much may want to engage in spatial mobility away
from dangerous zones. Notions such as vulnerability raise the question about the differential
capacities to respond to climate changes. When evaluating social inequalities, it is above all equality
norms, such as fulfilling basic human rights, which are used as a yardstick to gauge categorical
inequalities. In sum, this emerging third generation raises the question of how socio-natural facts are
implicated in reproducing existing social inequalities and stratification, and how they perhaps even
contribute to changing social institutions and cultural perceptions of the socio-natural question.

Categorical Social Inequalities

The cross-border flows of goods and services, especially when distributed in circumstances of
scarcity, do not allocate appropriate resources to those most in need. This is also why the overfishing
of the seas, overgrazing of pastures, and scarcity of potable water increase social inequality. In a
way, the expansive extractive model of the Anthropocene, and thus (post-)industrial capitalism, has
always resulted in positional inequalities. There is reason to expect that this should be of great
relevance also under conditions of ecological decline and degradation. This is why the social
mechanisms at work need to be detailed.
Social inequalities consist of the uneven distribution of costs and benefits with respect to goods
among social units such as individuals, groups, organizations, regions, and states. The unequal
distribution of resources, status, and power implies different chances of access to and movement
between social positions, demarcated, for example, by class. They make a difference for
opportunities—and refer to disparities of opportunity, access, and outcomes from wielding resources.
The resulting inequalities are not necessarily directly observable, especially if we consider deep
patterns of inequalities, such as class structure (Chapter 3). At the other end of the spectrum, others
are readily observable and measurable, such as social mobility of individuals and groups.
As to inequalities resulting in migration, it is a well-established finding that class as a
heterogeneity plays a prominent role, since the poorest segments of the population are especially
vulnerable to environmental risks (for the following empirical claims, see the case studies in
McLeman, Schade, and Faist 2016). If at all, the poorer strata usually have the option to move within
their countries, although crossing internationally recognized borders may be the only option in the
long run, especially when island states in the Pacific Ocean become submerged. In such a
constellation, resettlement may be the only option to maintain a decent living; for example, the
inhabitants of the island Kiribati have all been resettled (Schade 2013). However, costly resettlement
programmes may backfire. For example, Inuit in Alaska were (re)settled in areas which are now
slowly disappearing into emerging swamps (Bronen 2013). In general, the situation is especially
precarious for trapped populations who are neither able to engage in in-situ adaptation nor choose
migration as adaptation. In addition, the intersection of class and gender, for example, constitutes an
obvious link: women are especially vulnerable, also among the landless and poor, as they are eight
times more likely to be killed in natural disaster events compared with men (Adeniji 2011; IPCC
2014: chapter 11).
Those persons who are not destitute engage in migration mainly as a mechanism of opportunity
hoarding which requires the availability of a modicum of financial resources and social ties which
reduce the costs and risks of long-distance, international migration. Beyond well-known
heterogeneities, such as class, gender, age, religion, citizenship, or ethnicity, spatial heterogeneities in
the sense of location make a difference for coping with climate change-induced risks. Populations in
urban areas tend to have more capacity to cope with climate change, and those in the global North
more than those in the global South. Yet, for reasons of economic opportunity, people often migrate in
the wrong direction, towards areas endangered by flooding, not away from them. This is the case for
migration to urban areas in low-lying river deltas, such as Dhaka or Shanghai (Lassailly-Jacob and
Peyraut 2016).
Legal status is another heterogeneity which is tightly connected to inequalities in climate-induced
migration. It is crucial because it concerns the politico-legal constitution of a potential category of
climate refugees. One of the fundamental scientific obstacles is the difficulty of legally codifying
migrants in the context of climate change as refugees in a way that would provide for their protection
(Kälin 2015). It is close to impossible to clearly assign singular natural hazards to the consequences
of climate change. Yet although no clear legal case can be made with respect to the causal link
between climate change and migration, there is abundant plausibility and thus social space for ‘norm
entrepreneurs’ (Sunstein 1996). This type of entrepreneur has been active in trying to establish
particular human rights for refugees in situations of climate-induced migration. One proposal seeks to
make planned relocation the cornerstone of their proposal for a climate refugee regime (Bierman and
Boas 2008). The authors defined the term ‘climate refugee’ by embracing only people who flee the
direct effects of climate change (within or across borders), that is, sea-level rise, extreme weather
events, droughts, and water scarcity.
The use of the term refugee in this context was disputed because of its legal meaning under the
1951 Geneva Refugee Convention. Indeed, the UNHCR rejected the use of the terms climate refugee
or environmental refugee and any attempts to broaden the mandate of the Convention. For example, it
was argued that ‘giving refugee status to environmental refugees would only distort the definition and
strain the desperately scarce resources of the international refugee regime’ (Suhrke 1994: 492) This
opposition might have been one of the reasons why the terms environmental migration and climate
migration have since dominated in the debate and in research.

Outlook: The Socio-Natural Question Expanded

Climate change, or environmental destruction more generally, is not a normal social problem. It is
intricately related to globe-spanning politico-economic inequalities which cause, drive, and increase
the destruction of human habitat. Each year of insufficient action brings humankind closer to the limits
of sustainability. The forerunner of the latter is already visible in the increasing number of people
who choose to leave dead land or are compelled by force to do so. As this analysis suggests, the first
generation of scholarship on climate change and migration, by using a mechanistic approach to nature,
seriously underestimated the adaptive capacities of humans in the face of seminal ecological changes.
The second generation of scholarship focused on a particular kind of agency. The main protagonist
has been the resilient migrant who engages in successful adaptation to climate change. This newer
generation of scholarship has propagated a mostly market-liberal version of mobility—a mobile and
docile migrant who acts in an anticipatory and preventative manner, implying reduced responsibility
of the state and other collective actors. Moreover, it has given insufficient attention to the fact that the
nexus between climate change and singular events cannot be proven, at least not by natural science
methods. Taking a combined nature/culture lens (cf. Mooney, Duraiappah, and Larigauderie 2011),
we see that migration in the wake of climate change leaves intact deeper structures of social
inequalities and reinforces exclusionary mechanisms. What is nonetheless interesting is that this
hurdle has not prevented norm entrepreneurs from making a scandal of the dire fate of many migrants
who engage in or are even forced into climate-induced mobility—thus constituting the
transnationalized socio-natural question.
Research needs to be broadened not only to link climate change and migration to inequalities but
also to bring in civil violence. In most cases, climate change and violence are treated as two
independent threats, each of which potentially contributes to the flow of migrants around the world.
Recent work, however, suggests that climate change and civil violence could be causally interrelated.
Indeed, we already know that outbursts of civil violence are closely tied to variations in the El Niño
Southern Oscillation (ENSO) (Hsiang, Meng, and Crane 2011). The probability of a civil conflict
erupting doubles during El Niño versus La Niña years, and the ENSO may have been behind 21 per
cent of all civil conflicts between 1950 and 2004. This is a quite remarkable correlation and
variance. However, one should be cautious about generalizing the ENSO trend to an overall global
pattern (Hsiang, Meng, and Crane 2011: 440). Likewise, there is evidence suggesting a link between
global warming and a greater risk of civil violence in much of sub-Saharan Africa (Burke et al. 2009:
20670). Yet these results also need to be read with care. It is not (yet) possible to disentangle the
effects of other factors from climate change, such as violent crime, which is known to increase with
higher temperatures and non-farm labour productivity (Burke et al. 2009: 20672). Nonetheless, given
the potential of climate change to influence the frequency and severity of weather events such as El
Niño, global warming not only has the potential to generate migration directly through displacement
but also indirectly by triggering civil conflicts in affected areas throughout the world. Again, civil
wars trigger even more migration and refugee flows. In some cases, environmental degradation has
not caused civil war but contributed to it, as in the case of Syria after 2011.
With respect to changing perceptions of climate change, migration needs to be placed in the
context of general social transformations, the most important of which is the mode of organizing
economic life. Some analysts speak of a ‘metabolic rift’ (Foster 1999). This term refers to ecological
crisis tendencies under capitalism. Karl Marx theorized a rupture in the metabolic interaction
between nature and culture which derives from the mode of capitalist production and the growing
rupture between urban and rural regions (Marx 1962 [1867]: 192). Marx held this rift in the
interdependent processes of social metabolism to be irreconcilable with any kind of sustainability
(cf. Rosa et al. 2015) and the exploitation of humans paralleling that of the soil. In a similar vein,
another founding figure of sociology, Max Weber, according to Werner Sombart, declared that
industrial society would work ‘until the last ton of fossil fuel has burnt to ashes’ (van der Pot 1985:
846). In the meantime, however, we have learned that while capitalism has remained a pervasive
force it is ‘local at all points’ (Latour 1993: 117). It is exactly on the local scale where conflicts over
mitigation of and adaptation to climate change have occurred over the past years, before and after the
Paris Climate summit (2015), far away from spectacular world gatherings. (Local) climate conflicts,
rather than (global) climate governance, have been propelling some progress in addressing rampant
carbonization. What needs to be determined in future research is an effective combination of
responses to climate change which encompasses both exit and voice.
Solutions are hard to come by as long as they overlook structural mechanisms driving climate
change and political responses to it. Climate change is so difficult to fight because all decisive sets of
actors in current political regimes have inherent drives to keep on exploiting natural resources to the
utmost: though national states claim unconstrained sovereignty, they are most often constrained by
new spaces of economic domination in which multinational companies reign supreme (Sassen 2017).
Consumers also enjoy their individual rights to consume, an important basis for the legitimacy of
states and markets. Above all, alternatives to current modes of the exploitation of natural resources
need to confront the power of extractivism. The latter is not only related to climate change but to a
decline in, for example, biodiversity, loss of soil, water scarcity, and overfishing of the seas.
Extractivism can be tackled only by decreasing the use of non-renewable (but also renewable)
resources. Even a total conversion to energy production from renewable resources such as wind,
water, and sun would not necessarily solve the problem. Indeed, it may even deepen it, as, for
example, the use of renewable resources could drive increased extraction of non-renewable
resources for manufacturing processes and consumer products—it could become even easier to
increase the flood of consumerist production.
In sum, there is no easy way out of extractivist logic and the destruction of human habitat. What is
certain, however, is that the social processes of ecological change merit much more attention since, in
the words of Pope Francis’s Encyclical Letter Laudato Si (2015: 50), ‘a true ecological approach
always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the
environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.’ Furthermore, it needs to
be considered that ‘a true ecological debt exists particularly between the global north and south’
(Pope Francis 2015: 52). It is also well worth remembering that the urgent questions raised by
environmental degradation and climate change, given the tens of millions of people displaced each
year in their home countries, is not a scenario of the future but describes the present.
11

No Alternative? The Public Role of Social Scientists in

Understanding the Transnationalized Social Question

A better understanding of how social inequalities related to cross-border migration are produced
helps to foster alternative ways of thinking about the transnationalized social question. Such an
endeavour faces a major challenge when it comes to dealing with the public role of social scientists
in grappling with the contemporary social question. How can a broader public and thus civil society
gain access to and benefit from this knowledge?
Here, the main proposition is that social scientists’ role is one of brokerage between two fields,
that of scientific inquiry and of the public sphere. Public policy enters the picture indirectly through
communication in the public sphere. The specific challenge is that there is no strong coupling between
the fields of science, policy, and the public. Instead, the nexus is uncertain and precarious, with
unintended consequences constantly at work. Nonetheless, it is important that social scientists lay
open ethical assumptions which underlie their theoretical and empirical analyses, and that they be
aware of the multiple ways their knowledge feeds thinking outside research itself.
Therefore, the first part of this chapter outlines how the transnationalized social question has been
discursively constructed in the triangle of research, public policy, and the public sphere. The second
part sketches the proposition that the most fruitful role of social science research is not to advise
public policy but to shape debates in the public sphere. The third part shows that there is not simply a
gap between knowledge and praxis which can be bridged technically through a more efficient
transmission of research results into policy. Instead, the fields of social science research and public
policy follow fundamentally different logics. Nonetheless, as the fourth part shows, public policy and
social science research agendas often run parallel, evidenced in issues such as the link between
migration and development. The fifth part finally delves into the roles social scientists can play in the
public sphere: expert, advocate, and public intellectual. The sixth part suggests how social scientific
knowledge finds its ways into debates in the public sphere in areas as diverse as the modernization of
the economy, the border control function of states, and civil society as a site of imagining social
transformation. The chapter concludes with a plea for taking seriously the public function of social
science research as providing interpretation and meaning. Before delving into the analysis, a word of
caution is in order. This chapter does not aim to offer solutions in pushing for a renewed role of
national states or civil society. Instead, it strives to specify the role and function of social scientists in
public debates over cross-border migration. It is thus primarily about the role of social scientists in
the public sphere.
The Discursive Construction of the Transnationalized Social Question
The transnationalized social question consists of a variety of master mechanisms. Among them are
market liberalization, securitization, and culturalization of migration, but also the rights revolution.
More concretely, at stake are the systemic integration of welfare states and development states,
democratic politics, and citizenship, and also issues of transnational social relations and cultural
diversity relating to multiculturalism, diversity, and diaspora. From an empirical perspective, it is the
nexus of two intersecting fields which matters, namely social inequalities and cross-border migration.
With respect to immigration regions, the movement of people across borders is usually considered
—along with security, development, and climate change—as an issue signifying the interdependence
of the contemporary world. It connects vastly unequal global social spaces, unequal with respect to
political power, socio-economic resources, and cultural hegemony; as conceptualized in the four
social spaces of social protection (Chapter 4). Spatial mobility signifies action instead of mere talk.
Movement across borders is a crucial mode for responding to inequalities. To give an example: open
borders, if we had them, would contribute more to income equalization around the globe than would
free trade (Rodrik 2001). Even if this claim is exaggerated, movers across borders practise an
understanding of equality which is now the benchmark by which social inequalities are perceived in
both public debates and many academic analyses across the globe, namely, the understanding of
equality as equality of opportunity. In other stages of mobility processes, issues relating to equality of
access (e.g. to social protection) and equality of outcome (e.g. income) are at stake. In the EU those
citizens who live and work in other member states are hailed for taking advantage of the freedom of
mobility across borders and contributing to ‘Europeanization from below’ (cf. Recchi and
Triandafyllidou 2010 and Heidenreich 2016 for empirically grounded critical analyses of such
claims).
One of the relevant public issues is to what extent cross-border flows and transactions call for a
recognition of interdependence across borders and beyond the European realm, including both
welfare and developmental states. Such a line of thinking could be opened up with respect to
environmental destruction and the ensuing loss of habitat, the most visible form of which is discussed
today under the specific label of climate change, although the latter currently comes mostly above
environmental destruction in the context of human land use and other interventions in the socio-
ecosphere. At this point, social destitution and escape from deteriorating conditions by millions of
people are not likely to impinge directly upon the welfare of OECD countries yet—although higher
rates of migration forced by environmental destruction, resource extraction, economic exploitation,
and political destabilization seem to be only a matter of time. These considerations exemplify the
main kind of challenges to which the ruling classes around the world will have to respond. In short,
the concept of the transnationalized social question may serve as a heuristic tool for understanding
how the equality of national citizenship stands in tension with the inequalities of the world, both
within and across the borders of national states. It is apparent that an awareness of the
transnationalized social question is closely linked with the perception of interdependencies. The
question is how to respond to such perceived interdependencies along a continuum from closed to
open borders.
Viewed against this background, we can ask how the movement of people across state borders is
normatively evaluated in current public debates and public policies—and how the consequences may
thus contribute to the (re)production of cross-border social inequalities. Here, I briefly refer to the
social mechanism of hierarchization, which juxtaposes two categories of cross-border people,
namely, on the one hand those often called labour migrants, including those with regular and irregular
legal status, and on the other hand the so-called highly skilled, which include both those coming from
abroad and citizens (e.g. professionals) who venture abroad. The discursive contrasts between labour
migrants and the highly skilled are visible and evident in public debates as well as in academic
research over the past two decades (Chapter 8). In a way, category (1)—labour migrants—is wanted
but not welcome, whereas category (2)—highly skilled—is wanted and welcome (see Table 8.3). It
appears that labour migrants, including undocumented migrants, are rather negatively perceived,
whereas more positive connotations are connected to those considered mobile.
Labour migrants are understood as immigrants, whereas the highly skilled often are not. This
means that labour migrants are always connected to social integration into national societies, and that
the dangers of dis-integration or non-integration are a topic of constant public debate, as evidenced in
conflicts over citizenship requirements for migrants in naturalization procedures, or the demands
placed upon migrants in the form of civic and language requirements. In this view, the maintenance of
the transnational ties which attach them to their old homes may allow labour migrants to allocate
some resources through their networks and exchanges, help to confront daily needs, and provide
economic niches and jobs for initial adaptation in immigration contexts. But from a national social
integration perspective their transnationality will eventually lead to a social mobility trap. For this
group transnationality is likely to contribute further to a marginalized status in the immigration country
(Esser 2004) and, thus, for these migrants cross-border contacts—their transnationality—is
considered to be a liability because it hinders successful social integration.
By contrast, with respect to the highly skilled mobiles, spatial movement is often considered
economically efficient and thus desirable by policy-makers and even researchers. Apparently no
social integration is involved with respect to this categorization. Allegedly, a win-win-win situation
applies: countries of origin, countries of destination, and the highly skilled themselves all benefit
from cross-border ties. In this perspective, national economic competitiveness in global markets
leads to higher productivity. Functional necessities are often mentioned, such as knowledge society’s
need of brains—one has only to mention the recent spate of studies with respect to the mobility of
international students and the highly skilled (see e.g. Bilecen and Mol 2017). There is also a great
deal of public policy concern suggesting that mobility is the key to improved living standards in
countries of origin. A case in point is the debate on migration and development since the early 2000s,
instigated by the World Bank and taken up by other international organizations, national state
governments, the European Commission, and various civil society organizations (Chapter 7). In a
nutshell, the perception is that highly educated and professionally successful people move across
borders easily and possess the relevant competencies for cross-border communication and exchange.
Their transnational education and career paths increase their chances to secure a social position at the
upper end of the social ladder, with success being specific to fields (e.g. academic or economic) and
to the hierarchy of countries involved, and with the trend that certain local elites also seek to
internationalize their educational and professional resources (cf. Bühlmann, David, and Mach 2012
on Switzerland).
The discursive juxtaposition of category (1) vs. category (2) in itself is an outcome of upholding
and reproducing social inequalities on a national and global scale, in this case the social mechanism
of hierarchization of migrants and highly skilled mobiles. First, in public debates it seems as if
mobility is a phenomenon of the market which is regulated by Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, that is,
social order is emerging spontaneously out of aggregated individual rational acts (see Ferguson 1782
[1767]). However, it appears that international migration needs to be controlled tightly by national
states, mainly because the politics of migration and membership has not been globalized to the same
extent as markets. However, such a view overlooks the well-known fact that it is states, first and
foremost, which are implicated in the constitution of what we call markets: states authoritatively
constitute the rules which regulate markets. Second, it is important to remember that movement across
international borders is a specific case of boundary. There are also boundaries built around markers
of heterogeneity such as gender, age, and religion, among others, which are usually relevant not only
when we look at migration internal to national states but also in the selection and adaptation
processes of migrants.
Remittances considered as instruments for economic development in emigration countries, and the
idea that international migrants have the capacity to drive forward economic growth, were not among
the central tenets of the Millennium Development Goals between 2000 and 2015 (UNDP 2009).
Nonetheless, during the past decade-and-a-half, attention to the potential of migrants’ remittances for
development has increased tremendously (Sørensen, Van Hear, and Engberg-Pedersen 2002). Experts
and researchers have held a key function in the renaissance of the idea that migration plays a central
role in economic and human development. In the Sustainable Development Goals (2015), cross-
border migration is defined for the first time as a crucial field of action, including its link with the
consequences of climate change.1 Researchers have established a link between migration and
development via remittances, and have convinced governments and international organizations to
implement improved measurement techniques to record remittance flows (see e.g. Bakker 2014).
While this latter optimistic rendition could be disputed, the question is what role social scientists,
among other actors in the public sphere, have played in linking basic and applied research. The latter
has often been conducted in the context of policy changes, which have touted migrants’ remittances as
a development tool.
As we have seen, the focus on financial remittances has not only come to constitute new
development actors—migrants as individuals and as collectives such as diasporas—but also shifted
the responsibility for economic development further away from the national developmental state to
civil society and the market, and further to the individual migrant (Chapters 7 and 9). And although
remittances tend to contribute to growing consumption on the household level, remittance-led
economic development as such has, by and large, not spurred sustained regional and national
development. In the political realm, emigration and remittances have tended to bolster existing
stratification of power by rewarding the middle classes.

Linking the Social Sciences and the Public Sphere

It is imperative to ask how social scientists may be involved in and enter the political debates, some
of which have been sketched above, on social inequalities around cross-border migration. To start
with, there is an often-mentioned gap between research in the social sciences, on the one hand, and
social action and praxis, on the other. With respect to emigration states in particular, this alleged
disjuncture is particularly pertinent in the migration–development–securitization nexus. At first
glance, this may seem astonishing because migration studies and development research—both fields
being interdisciplinary in kind—are characterized by a high degree of commissioned research. This
kind of research is often politically motivated. For example, one of the main motivations to sponsor
economic development via remittances is to reduce international migration from the global South to
the global North. However, academic research has maintained relative autonomy when it comes to
policy claims. To illustrate; over recent years politicians across Europe have often argued that higher
levels of economic development (measured by per capita income and/or increased human
development indicated by lower infant mortality and higher rates of literacy) would eventually lead to
a decrease in international migration (European Commission 2002). Academic analysts of migration
insist, however, that—while this expectation may be borne out in the long run, considering
demographic transitions and economic transformations—increased economic development correlates
highly with increased international migration, expressed in concepts such as the ‘migration hump’ or
the ‘inverted U-curve’ (e.g. P. Martin and Taylor 1996). Moreover, while the policy world may be
concerned with implementing more efficient means of migration control, ranging from border controls
to development cooperation, academic researchers often place emphasis on those endogenous
dynamics of cross-border migration, which escape blunt efforts at control, such as irregular migration
(Massey et al. 1998), often crystallizing in charges of migrants as security risks.
Another example of an often-mentioned gap between social science and social praxis is the social
integration of migrants in countries of immigration. There is much concern for social cohesion on all
accounts. The public debates revolve around issues such as acculturation, inclusion in core fields
(e.g. education, employment, housing, politics, religion), interaction within and beyond immigrant
groups, and identification with immigration and emigration collectives. What has become quite
visible is the importance of the intersection between class and other culturally defined heterogeneities
such as religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and language. The politicization of these
heterogeneities, of religion with respect to Islam in Europe in particular, contributes to the production
of inequalities along culturally understood heterogeneities.
Thus, even in these fields of migration and development, and migration and social integration,
which seem to be strongly immersed in public policy issues and public debates, practitioners and
academic researchers alike heatedly debate the difficulties of mutual exchange (on gender and
diversity, see Siim and Mokre 2013). At the core stands the following question, which has been
debated as long as social science research has existed: would social science knowledge be more
useful if it could be more easily applied instrumentally? In other words, would we desire a state of
affairs in which political action could be systematically based on knowledge about calculable causal
relations, as the term ‘evidence-based policy’ rather than ‘dogma’ would suggest (cf. Boswell 2009)?
While this may be a fruitful question to begin with, it is ultimately misleading. John Maynard Keynes
indicated already in the 1930s that finding a direct link between the intellectual and the political
world may be difficult to achieve, but pointing nonetheless to the crucial role of sometimes
scientifically obscure economic ideas in praxis: ‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite
exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slave of some defunct economist. Madmen in
authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling the frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few
years back. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval’ (Keynes 1970 [1936]: 361).
The fields of academic research and public policy are based on different assumptions. These
assumptions, in turn, provide for different views about the function of knowledge. While academic
research is geared more toward the function of knowledge being to understand, for example,
phenomena such as migration–development–security, diaspora formation, social integration, and
symbolic politics in a critical perspective, public policy tends to prioritize the instrumental use of
knowledge, such as reducing poverty rates, increasing levels of economic development, and tackling
issues connected to social integration of migrants and the respective societies. The proposition here
is that the social sciences do not so much produce social technologies, but offer world views and
lenses which help to categorize observable social facts and make it possible to arrive at
interpretations. The world of public policy-making, by contrast, is structured by its own dynamics in
which political interests aim to secure power and also to at least partly shape social life. Policy-
makers use social science knowledge when it serves the internal dynamics of policy-making, and
quite frequently it may not even serve this function, as when electoral pressures trump expert
knowledge. Politicians are often driven by political exigencies and in such circumstances end up
ignoring evidence where it fails to support electorally appealing courses of action—especially in
areas susceptible to populist styles of action such as migration, as in the politics of the meta-issue
migration (Chapters 7 and 8). At any rate, the social sciences, including not only sociology but also
political science, anthropology, social geography, and economics, have delivered a myriad of such
lenses in the form of concepts dealing with human and economic development or with social
integration.
The very fact that the social sciences usually may not have direct impacts on decision-making but
are able to influence at best the choice of lenses through which social problems are viewed, makes it
all the more important to look not only at the interaction of social scientists and policy-makers in
governments, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, social movement
organizations, and the like, but also at their role in the public sphere. If it is true that social scientists
can usefully provide lenses through which to view and identify issues, topics, and problems, rather
than serving a prescriptive role, the direct linkage to policy (and thus decision-making) should not be
overrated. Yet discursive and indirect impacts then assume an ever more crucial role. And it is in the
public sphere that such lenses are debated (Habermas 1991 [1962]). In the public sphere political
decisions in democracies, no matter how particularistic the interests behind them are, can usually be
seen to make and to have been legitimized by reference to universal or particularistic norms and
corresponding beliefs. The ubiquitous references in policy debates to meta-norms such as human (and
social) rights, the almost undisputed gospel of economic growth as a mechanism for redistribution of
goods, or national security, are examples that come to mind.
This line of argument suggests that there is indeed a coupling of the two worlds of policy/politics
and academia, albeit not through direct application of knowledge, but rather through ways of thinking
and representation in the public sphere. In this way social scientists are themselves brokers bridging
‘structural holes’ (Burt 1992) between the spheres of policy, civil society, and research, all of which
function along different principles and rationalities. The function of academic knowledge in the
public sphere goes beyond the ‘enlightenment’ role (Weiss 1979) because it also sets an agenda for
public debates. Thus, social science knowledge, on the one hand, and the system of public policy, on
the other, are two very different spheres. But they are linked in the realm where ideas are exchanged
and arguments occur in publicly accessible forums which range from mass media to small circles of
debate.
The proposition just sketched can be explicated in three issue areas. The first concerns the
confluence of public policy and research agendas. In this area we are basically concerned with the
(mutual) conditioning and conjunctures of academic research and policy paradigms. The second issue
area deals with knowledge production in the social sciences and the public role of social scientists.
Finally, the third area addresses social science knowledge and its uses in public policy and in the
public sphere. But before plunging into these issue areas, however, it is necessary to question the
standard account of why the worlds of academic research and public policy supposedly talk past each
other.
The Standard Account of Linking the Social Sciences and Public Policy: The
Gap Hypothesis and Its Deficiencies

A deficit or gap argument lies at the core of the standard debate, which states that given the large
stock of academic knowledge in various fields of societal life, the de facto usage of this kind of
knowledge in politics and by state and non-state policy-makers is widely insufficient. In the fields of
cross-border migration, development, integration, and inequalities, we may claim to have knowledge
about how financial remittances ameliorate or increase social inequalities in regions of origin and
destination of migrants. This knowledge, as the argument could go, is only insufficiently applied to
policies by the respective national governments or international organizations. In this view, much
more could be done to facilitate the transfer of money by reducing transaction costs in offering
channels alternative to Western Union and MoneyGram, for example, or to transfer ‘best practices’
from one immigration, transit, or emigration country to another. Hence, no publication on the subject
of remittances fails to mention the Mexican government’s ‘3 for 1’ programme in which each
‘migradollar’ is complemented by an extra dollar from the federal and regional government. The fact
that only a fraction of remittances is channelled into this programme is rarely mentioned (Castles and
Delgado Wise 2007). To take another example, this time with respect to social integration: during the
1990s the multicultural policies of states such as Canada and Australia (but also the Netherlands and
Sweden in Europe) were touted as progressive integration policies because they tried to ensure the
recognition of cultural practices and represented the diversity of the population in public services
such as the police and the health sector. Yet, in the first decade of the twenty-first century,
multiculturalism was declared dead. Little mention since then has been made of the fact that, while the
terminology has changed from multiculturalism to citizenship and integration in front-runner countries
such as Sweden, most of the earlier policies have remained in place (see e.g. Spång 2007). In this
latter case, according to the gap hypothesis, what needs to be supplied is sufficient knowledge about
actually existing multicultural policies. This move in itself would contribute to the continuation of
multicultural policies.
Usually, three reasons are advanced to account for the allegedly deplorable gap between the
plentiful store of research knowledge and its application in decision-making. The first posits that
social scientists simply do not yet know enough about certain causal relationships or mechanisms of
behaviour. In the case of financial remittances, this refers, for example, to the question how—if at all
—remittances sent to family members in regions of origin aggregate from the family level to local
communities or even to the national economy. So far, social scientists know very little about such
processes of aggregation.
The second reason offered relates to the transfer of results from the social sciences to praxis. Each
of the two spheres uses its own language and particular jargon. One could argue that social scientists
write in barely intelligible ways and should strive for greater clarity. This observation suggests that a
simple one-to-one transfer is not possible. Instead, the processes and tasks involved could be better
described as the mutual translation of different codes characteristic of the social sciences and public
policy, respectively. Thus, it is not surprising that policy-makers establish expert commissions—such
as the GCIM convened in 2005 by the then Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan—not
only to legitimize decisions or delay them, but also to translate actual research results. We can
observe a similar pattern of knowledge translation in the deliberations of public forums around social
integration, as in Germany’s DIK (Chapter 8). A third explanation of the gap suggests that those who
apply social science knowledge lack the capacity to interpret research results correctly, or that their
readiness to learn is also limited. If so, a change in the style of thinking among this group would be
warranted. This third argument is highly questionable because we find that many policy-makers do in
fact have a social science background, especially if the field of economics is included.
This standard account needs to be questioned in a fundamental way because of its rationalist
prejudice, a mode of thinking based on a purely instrumental model according to which the social
sciences are to be used in applying generalized findings to specific, concrete situations. In abstract
terms, this perspective says: if A then B, or B as a function of A. The policy-maker then seeks to
change B or produce B, and so forth. This formula seems to be rather short-sighted, not least because
all knowledge needs to be translated to consider, for example, ceteris paribus conditions. When
talking about the effects of a policy, one cannot simply say, when A then B, and so on; one needs to
know about the consequences of specific and complex sets of factors (cf. Hoppe 2005). Yet such
knowledge is not simply stored in a warehouse of the social sciences. There is also no recipe-like
knowledge in the form of easy rules to follow (Luhmann 1992). For example, one may argue that so-
called mobility partnerships between EU member states and countries adjacent to EU borders in
North Africa and the Middle East will yield benefits for the states involved, that is, a reduction of the
number of migrants to the EU and trade opportunities or financial aid for countries of transit and
origin—disregarding for the moment the fate of migrants themselves who are exposed to more
coercive policy instruments en route. Yet the number of ceteris paribus conditions affecting such an
externalization of migration control or remote control formulas is legion. It would take a great deal of
specific knowledge other than academic knowledge—such as tacit, everyday, and local knowledge—
to appreciate the conditions in which chances for trade, financial transfers, and the selection of
particular categories of migrants make a particular impact.
Even more important is that all social science knowledge is value-bound, even if derived under
the Weberian ideal of value-free objectivity. Crucial concepts, such as development, exploitation,
social integration, and social inequality, have direct and strong relations to values. While
development, for example, can be defined very differently along the lines of economic growth and
resources available, or along indicators of social sustainability including health, generalized trust
among citizens, and happiness, for instance, the concept is bound to ethical assumptions and goals
(Payne and Phillips 2010). With these notions in mind, social scientists produce something of a world
view of selected parts of reality, which also implies an agenda for acting in a certain way. For
example, the notions of economic development and human or social development suggest somewhat
different policy actions regarding the use and desirability of financial remittances. Notions of
economic development would emphasize the investment character of remittances, for example into
education, health, or manufacturing. By contrast, notions of social development, such as Amartya
Sen’s (1981) capability approach, draw upon the idea that persons (should) have a choice in how to
employ remittances in aid of certain objectives, for example geographical mobility, which constitutes
one of many possible elements in the individual’s well-being and quality of life.

The Confluence of Public Policy and Research

The mutual constitution of public policy and research concerns a host of questions revolving around
how research and policy agendas are set and potentially interact, and how policy and research
agendas parallel each other. In particular, one needs to identify how the research and policy interests
in the transnationalized social question have coincided in three consecutive cycles or phases, and
what exactly the (counter-)paradigmatic strands were (Chapter 7).
Since the 1950s there has been a confluence of policy and research cycles on the migration–
development nexus. This is not to say that there were one-way streets between science and policy or
public debates. Nonetheless, it indicates that there were elective affinities or even mutual
conditionings. What can be said with some certainty is that public policy drew upon research
concepts when suitable, and that academic research provided appropriate models which were later
(indirectly) used to justify a renewed emphasis on remittances. For example, in the transition from the
second to the third phase, in the 1990s, approaches such as NELM, in economics, and the livelihood
approach, originating in sociology and anthropology, focused on small collective units such as
families and kinship groups as main decision-making sites and realms of action regarding cross-
border migration. The former approach looks at migration as a kind of informal insurance against
risks such as crop failure, whereas the latter views migration through the lens of ensuring a living in
often adverse circumstances. These mid-range concepts constituted a decisive move away from
analytical models that prioritized individuals as the main unit of analysis, as in neo-classical
migration economics. The change of perspective from individuals to small groups, and from rational
choice to social choice, led researchers to take a more nuanced look at the origins, flows, and
consequences of financial transfers (Chapter 3). For example, in the past, the use of remittances to
pay bills for health and tuition fees or consumer products had been seen as unproductive. Yet a closer
look at how some families or larger collectives pooled resources to cope with social protection led
researchers to realize that investments in the areas mentioned could be helpful in coping with diverse
economic hazards and combating poverty. Now there was a proliferation of arguments that the effect
of remittances in the earlier literature and policies had been underestimated. Though it would be
difficult to trace the exact route taken by these changing concepts from the social sciences into the
decision-making and planning of (inter-)governmental organizations, it stands to reason that the
changes of analytical patterns used across the phases of the migration–development nexus are no
coincidence.
A similar narrative heuristic can be seen in both academic and policy thinking about social
integration. During the 1960s and 1970s assimilation theories guided much of the research and policy
measures. It should not be forgotten, however, that it took countries such as Germany until the 1990s
to recognize the permanent settlement of some of the former guest-workers and even longer to
construct a self-understanding that included immigration as a phenomenon to be addressed by more
explicit integration policies. This partial reorientation also brought along discussions of the self-
understanding of the national collective. The mantra ‘Germany is not a country of immigration’ slowly
changed to ‘is a country of immigration’ and, signalling a concern with the implications for diversity,
‘is an immigration society’ (Hess and Green 2016).
The idea that changing laws and regulations on national belonging predominantly serve the self-
confirmation of the majority society, as exemplified by the reform of citizenship law in Germany
around the year 2000, is often overlooked. This should not be taken to support the argument that such
changes are ‘only’ an element of symbolic politics. Rather, fundamental concepts such as those
underlying socio-political interventions are affected. Educational policy constitutes a significant
example in this regard. In current debates, the requirements of social participation are being
expressed as follows: the preschool and school system should also be a foundation for the children of
migrant workers so that they, too, have realistic opportunities in the job market (Kuhnhenne et al.
2012). In Germany, in the past three decades, two to three times as many young people with a
‘migration background’ as without have been unable to find apprenticeships, often do not attain a
school-leaving qualification, and are over-represented in schools for students with special
educational needs. This raises the question of how young people with a ‘migration background’ can
acquire the skills they need to participate in the job market. Much research suggests that any measures
to further this goal must be underpinned with solid financing and follow the principle of educational
foresight rather than compensatory aftercare by means of social welfare programmes (Faist and
Ulbricht 2017). Without a clear grounding in a collective ‘us’—especially on a national level—
political coalitions that challenge the alliance of interests benefiting older generations, who currently
dominate the discourse, are unthinkable. In this regard, accomplishing the task of integrating the
autochthonous population into a multi-ethnic social reality is vital for any progress towards equality
of participation for migrants and their children, and for a common understanding of communal
relations. It is therefore puzzling that research has almost exclusively only dealt with the social
integration of migrants. New types of communal relationships in majority groups will not lead to
conflict-free dealings with migration, however, even though they are appropriate to a culturally
heterogeneous society and function as a socio-moral basis for increased participation.

Knowledge Production and the Role of Social Scientists in the Public Sphere
Having not only outlined the different logics of the academic and policy spheres but also how
research and policy agendas often overlap, we are now able to move to the kind of knowledge
produced by academic social scientists and the role they play in the public sphere (cf. Burawoy
2005). The public sphere is much broader than the sphere of public policy-making, and relates to the
realm of public debate. The question therefore is: what role have social scientists played in the
linkage of knowledge production and public policies through participation in the public sphere?
To start with and as mentioned before, knowledge gained from research in the social sciences can
rarely be condensed into social technologies. The specific objects of study by social scientists are not
amenable to social engineering. Yet this technological deficit is not an outcome of the inability of
most social sciences to devise ever more sophisticated techniques of observation and measurement,
but is due to the specificity of the objects and the associated normative implications. Prioritizing
social change and progress has been legitimized by concepts such as modernity, post-modernity, and
socialism/communism, concepts which themselves embody a cultural consciousness of the
changeableness of things. A direct consequence of this spirit of (post)modernity is that scientific
claims usually allow for various and diverging interpretations. There is a constant debate over
results, based in the competing paradigms and the multiple normatively grounded belief systems
underlying social scientists’ claims. One does not need to adhere to a criticism of the ‘strong
programme of science’ (Barnes 1974) and thus engage in a social reductionist interpretation of the
social sciences to realize that the questions posed by social scientists and the interpretations of
research results are guided by normatively bounded ideas. Terms such as social protection, social
integration, or development, as shorthand for multifarious and even contradictory goals such as the
good life, economic growth, equality of opportunity or of outcome, and ecological sustainability, lend
at least suggestive support to the hunch that such normative ideas need not be very specific and may
even have passed their conceptual zenith in academic research—as the concept of development in
fact has—but still serve as rallying foci in public policy debates and praxis, and in debates in the
public sphere, as there are no ready-made successor terms available. One is reminded to apply
Kuhn’s (1962) idea of paradigm shift from scientific to policy concepts: policy frames such as
development are not given up unless there is a ready-made successor concept available.
The crucial point of departure is the linkage between knowledge and the public. Often, two types
of knowledge are contrasted, namely, instrumental knowledge, which is oriented towards the means to
achieve goals, and reflexive knowledge, which is geared towards normatively desirable ends. This
stark distinction is reminiscent of Kant’s moral imperative,2 which argues against using persons as
means rather than ends. Both forms of knowledge, instrumental and reflexive, can be found in the
various self-understandings of the social sciences. In order to grasp the role of social scientists in the
public sphere, we may distinguish three main types or functions, since an individual social scientist
may fulfil various roles simultaneously and/or successively: social scientists may act as experts,
advocates, or public intellectuals.
A prominent function of the first type, the expert, is that of a consultant to political organizations.
Expert hearings and commissions on all types of political issues, such as the ethics of migration and
the social integration of migrants, abound in democracies. Jürgen Habermas (1968) famously
criticized this state of affairs in that such politics leads to the division of labour among experts who
are no longer able to understand the wider context of society. The Independent Commission on In-
Migration (Unabhängige Kommission Zuwanderung) in Germany (2000–2), for example, consulted
about a hundred academic experts in its comprehensive look at Germany’s immigration processes. A
similar process occurred on a global scale with the GCIM. Experts usually refer to specialist
knowledge and debates among academics which potentially exclude members of the general public.
Knowledge that is instrumentalized for policy-making and shaping policy interventions bears the risk
of producing a selective picture of migration processes, which might be additionally filtered by
political end-users in order to legitimize decision-making processes (Boswell 2009). While this type
of knowledge can be important for achieving urgent political decisions and legitimizing political
rulings, it might also oversimplify social phenomena and offer pragmatic and often technology driven
solutions for social processes that are in fact multi-faceted and complex, such as migration. In
contrast, academic knowledge production based on critical and public migration studies might be
more appropriate for in-depth reflections on the causes, processes, and consequences of migration. It
may also challenge established academic and political paradigms, as well as in practical terms
enhance civil society engagement in the use of academic knowledge on migration more actively. In
other words, while policy studies based on instrumental knowledge inform policy-makers, it is
studies directed with an eye to civil society that have a high potential to inform debate in the public
sphere. Reflexive migration studies, we may argue, take into account the interdependences and
connectivities under conditions of asymmetric information and political power. In sum, while
instrumental knowledge is goal-oriented and can be useful for addressing urgent issues (e.g.
protecting human lives in times of hardship, as in the case of boat people in the Mediterranean Sea or
migrants in the Sahara desert in recent years), reflexive knowledge is necessary to create sustainable
responses to migration drivers and the long-term effects that human movements can have for societies
of origin, destination, and transit. Instrumental expert knowledge does not suffice to forge durable
solutions.
The second type of social scientist in the public sphere is the advocate. Advocates take sides.
Their self-understanding may correspond to those of Burawoy’s (2005) ‘critical sociologists’ who
are politically aligned activists and who envision their research as contributing to or strengthening the
cause in which they are engaged. Not only is the area of migration and development fertile ground for
debates on social justice, equality, human rights, and other fundamentals; it is also a field in which
advocacy is coupled with research. Particularly salient examples are researcher-advocates who
support Muslim organizations to gain public recognition and a secure institutional foothold (e.g.
Schiffauer 2010). There are also positions in between expert and advocate, such as that of ‘involved
detachment’, as claimed by Norbert Elias, which is rooted in academic and thus professional
sociology but reaches out to public sociology. Elias remarked that the role of social scientists’
engagement is an issue of ‘how to keep their two roles as participants and inquirers clearly and
consistently apart, and, as a professional group, how to establish in their work the undisputed
dominance of the latter’ (Elias 2007: 84). Sociologists may speak to publics from on high as in such
works as Pierre Bourdieu’s La Misère du monde (1998b) which looks at social inequalities
produced in the context of cross-border processes. At best, such books generate public debate and
raise public consciousness about socio-political and economic issues. They work through various
media—radio, print, film, electronic—that easily distort the original message. Organic public
sociology, on the other hand, involves an unmediated dialogue between sociologists and their publics,
taking place in civil society. Here we find publics that are more local and more active—at any rate,
in direct engagement with labour movements, migrants, prisoners, or even transnational NGOs
(Burawoy 2005).
Advocacy may also lead to questioning normative stances taken by migration scholars. One
example is to use the concept of ‘fair migration’ (Chapter 9) to argue against ‘open borders’. The call
for open borders, and thus complete freedom of movement for individuals, much like issues of free
trade and free capital movement, could potentially place less-developed countries in an even more
disadvantaged position. Calls for open borders are connected to the mobility–immobility discussion.
It appears as if one positively loaded pole, sedentarism, is increasingly being replaced by its
opposite, nomadism. Yet such an opposition is ahistorical, to say the least. Nomadism is a concept
that refers to specific way of making a life by itinerant people living off cattle or other livestock. It is
thus not appropriate for use in a capitalist context, and its metaphorical tinge is misleading. Quite to
the contrary, migration in the Neolithic age was a prerequisite for eventual settlement and the
development of sedentary agriculture (Manning 2013: chapter 4). Talk of nomadism is also short-
sighted, as the image of nomadism across borders prioritizes spatial mobility as a fixed
characteristic, akin to the tenet that factors of production should be mobile. It occludes the fact that
labour is, at best, a fictitious commodity; the issue is not only whether labour is wanted by human
beings but also whether it is welcome (Chapters 8 and 9). In short, this shift towards a positive
evaluation of movement is deeply problematic because it usually does not reflect underlying trends
which aim to build a flexible, docile, and politically abstinent global workforce, devoid of voice.
And it does not engage in questions about the compatibility of high degrees of spatial mobility with
locally based political equality and liberty, that is, democracy.
Finally, the third type of social scientist in the public sphere is that of the public intellectual. The
public intellectual seeks to change the perspective of the reader or listener by strength of the better
argument. We may think of Jürgen Habermas’s interventions with respect to migration and
multiculturalism arguing against scapegoating of certain migrant groups. His morally demanding
statements have been widely diffused in the Western world (e.g. Habermas 2010). The public
intellectual engages diverse publics, reaching beyond the university to enter into an on-going dialogue
with these publics about fundamental values. However, such an approach needs to consider that the
migration–development nexus in the global South and the migration–welfare state nexus in the global
North are intimately related to the global migration–security nexus through the migration industry
which channels people across borders (Sørensen 2012). The possibilities for debate are therefore
severely circumscribed by the (sometimes implicit) linkage to security concerns. Restrictive, or more
precisely, selective immigration policies of OECD countries are legitimized by pointing out the
dangers of migration to national and welfare state security, thus severely limiting the development
potential of migration. One may surmise that while direct input into public policy-making concerns
social scientists, above all, as experts, the public sphere is primarily the realm of the advocate and
the public intellectual. There is also a mixed type, called partisan, which is a combination of
advocate and public intellectual. The partisan comes close to the organic public intellectual as
envisioned by Antonio Gramsci (Gramsci 1971). As an example, one might want to think of the
winner of the 2003 Right Livelihood Award,3 Walden Bello, who researched migration from the
Philippines and also chaired the Filipino parliament’s Committee on Overseas Workers Affairs and
has contributed to the GFMD.

Knowledge and Its Uses in Public Policy and the Public Sphere

The next issue brings together considerations on the fit between the production of academic
knowledge and policy, and the public role of social scientists: how have research findings on
migration and transnational aspects of social inequalities made their way into public debates and
political decision-making? It is useful to start any analysis of linkages between research and public
policy and the public sphere by considering the inherent systemic logic of the different fields.
Political decision-making has its own rationality. The instrumental application of social scientific
knowledge does not by any means lie at the centre of political decision-making for public policy.
Politically, knowledge derived from research is a tool but not necessarily an aid to or requirement for
problem-appropriate solutions. Academic knowledge may serve three functions for decision- and
policy-making: legitimizing, substantiating, and symbolic.
First, social science knowledge may serve to legitimize decisions already taken or to delay
decisions deemed undesirable. In this way, policy-making authorities in government can gain
epistemic authority in defining what the public knows. The fields of immigration and asylum are
highly contested policy areas and are characterized by a high degree of methodological uncertainty, as
can be seen quite vividly in the field of irregular migration. By definition, it is impossible to arrive at
a reliable estimate of the number of irregular migrants. Expert estimates can sometimes show a wide
range: the number of irregular migrants in Germany, for example, lay somewhere between 180,000
and 520,000 in 2014 (Vogel 2015). Others speak of 376,000 irregular migrants for Germany and 2.2
million irregular migrants for the EU in 2015 (Eurostat 2016e). Clearly, and most importantly, there is
a huge asymmetry in the usage of knowledge. Political decision-makers may tap into social science
knowledge at their will, largely unencumbered by the intentions of social scientists. Policy-makers
can select a particular voice from the social sciences to listen to and endorse. For example, in a
period of increasingly restrictive immigration policies in the late 1970s, an ILO report, written by
authors from the Hamburg Archive for World Economy, drew on standard trade theory which argued
that trade should substitute for migration (Hiemenz and Schatz 1979). That is, instead of migrating to
work in garment shops in New York, Bangladeshi workers should produce shirts in Dhaka to be
exported to the Americas. In practice, this does not work since rich countries usually protect their
own inefficient industries while forcing countries in the global South to drop their import tariffs (cf.
Haveman and Shatz 2004). Yet, precisely because the ILO report mirrored a standard economic
argument in migration policy, it could be used in such a way as to legitimize very restrictive
immigration policies.
Second, academic knowledge may have a substantiating function in that it can strengthen the
position of an organization, a political party, or politicians vis-à-vis rivals, contending parties, and
positions. The World Bank, for example, emphasized the magnitude of financial remittances sent by
migrants compared to Official Development Aid in the early 2000s in order to position itself as a
regulator of international financial flows. After all, in those days fewer and fewer developing
countries were taking out loans from the World Bank. The World Bank thus drew upon the migration–
development link to reposition itself among international players in the field of finance.
Research findings could also work the other way around, substantiating a critical function. An
example of how social science may challenge the ways of thinking about cross-border migration is
the linkage between climate change and mobility. Much policy discussion on the environmental
degradation–migration linkage has been driven by a simplistic notion of people responding to climate
change, as if changes in nature directly create social vulnerabilities. As we have seen (Chapter 10), it
is true that vulnerability to climate change is differential and affects people in the global South—
especially the poorer ones—much harder than in the global North, and that the hazards affect people
differently along heterogeneities such as class, race, gender, or age. Yet a view which constructs a
direct link between climate change and migration neglects the plausible thesis that climate change is
human-made, that humans have altered the climate of the earth. As quite a few observers have
suggested, we are already living in the geological age of the Anthropocene, characterized by
humankind shaping the very climate. Most importantly, climate change is rarely the sole driver of
migration: the destruction of natural/economic ecological systems and the resulting displacement of
people lie at the root of the degradation–migration nexus. Current climate change refers to processes
which come on top of degradation caused by processes such as land grabbing by multinational
companies or foreign states. It is therefore crucial to embed thinking about policies responding to
climate change in broader frames of environmental destruction induced by unfettered market
liberalism.
Third, knowledge sometimes fulfils a symbolic function by contributing to the credibility of
politicians and public authorities. To illustrate, one has only to call to mind the spate of academic
working papers commissioned or invited by organizations such as the United Nations, government
agencies, ministries, and other public agents active in the field both on national and international
levels.
Whatever the specific function knowledge from research serves in policy-making and public
debates, political decisions have to be legitimized by referring to universal values and norms,
although particular interests may guide them. For example, restrictive immigration clauses in the EU
regulations regarding asylum seekers are not simply legitimized by reference to potentially tight
labour markets or the burden upon social welfare systems. Rather, such policies are discussed jointly
with normative goals, such as addressing the so-called root causes of migration in the regions of
origin—most prominently migration from African countries to Europe (cf. Betts 2013). Further, the
EU has taken vigorous measures to link cooperation with African countries beyond clear exchange
packages and in terms of migration control in exchange for development aid, as in the case of Libya,
Mali, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan.
Beyond looking at various instrumental linkages between social science knowledge and the policy
sphere, it is important to consider that as an academic endeavour the main self-declared task of the
social sciences is diagnosis. Guiding social action and generating remedies is usually not found
among their goals, with the important exception of those social scientists who understand themselves
as advocates. Social science knowledge may thus be most effective in publicly disseminating
concepts, notions, and associated arguments—in short, ways of thinking about and accounting for
puzzles and open questions. In this way, social science knowledge can make a difference in defining
the relevant policy targets and providing the indicators to measure social problems. Nonetheless, the
use of knowledge involves above all the interpretation of events, the attribution of meaning to
processes, and thus also the (re)definition of situations. Where public policy as discussed in the
public sphere is concerned, it is indirect influence that counts, that is, those crucial notions and
concepts which guide societal perception and interpretation of societal processes and not the actual
stock of empirical findings. The definitions of social situations are highly relevant for defining and
framing issues and questions, not for decision-making as such. A prominent example is the Migrant
Integration Policy Index, which evaluates the success of integration policies across various
immigration countries.4 In sum, the social sciences provide ever-new concepts and meanings to social
change in societies. Ultimately, this influence increases the reflexivity of societal conditions.
A decisive and close analysis of how social science concepts spread in the public sphere and in
public policy-making necessitates a look at the secondary effects of social science knowledge and,
more specifically, a study of feedback loops. How such knowledge in the broadest sense is received
depends very much upon structures of plausibility in public discourse (Woodly 2015). While social
science concepts may be received favourably under certain conditions, these situations themselves
may be propelled to keep changing, also as a result of the diffusion of social science knowledge. For
example, the latest and third phase of the migration–development nexus re-emerged at a time when the
development industry was casting around for new target groups, when international financial
institutions, most prominently the World Bank, were searching for new areas of activity. Once the
associated ideas of migrants as development agents started spreading across Europe, (local)
administrations turned to the social sciences for help in framing issues. Thus, this essentially
transnationalist paradigm, for example, is now strongly embedded in various governmental circles in
France and Spain (Lacomba and Cloquell 2014). Such imports from the social sciences prefigure the
engagement of public authorities through the funding of NGOs and migrant associations engaged in
development cooperation with regions of migrant origin.
The proposition that the most important effect of social science knowledge is its potential for
creating (a new) public perspective on social issues is borne out by the conclusions of researchers
who look at the policy implications of the migration–development nexus (DeWind and Holdaway
2008). Virtually all studies conclude that it is the analytic (research to determine the impacts of
policies) and the explanatory (research to explain why governments adopt the policies) functions that
loom largest and are most effective, whereas the prescriptive function (recommendations, based on
research, regarding policies governments should adopt to attain particular goals) is usually not very
successful in finding direct entry into public policy. Similar results can be drawn from research on
immigrant integration (Favell 2001).
Three areas in particular can be discerned in which the meaning function of the social sciences for
understanding cross-border migration as a transnationalized social question looms large: the economy
in between market liberalization and decommodification through social rights; the governance of
borders and boundaries through the state, as evidenced in the tension between multiculturalism and
culturalized secruritization; and efforts to self-transform civil society. The economy is dominated
above all by modernization issues; the state is not only concerned with the governance of borders and
boundaries but also with principles of conviviality and social cohesion which undergird rights and
obligations of members; civil society centres on social transformation in the age of the Anthropocene
and the role of mobility in advancing opportunities of individuals and groups (see also Chapter 7 for
the analytical distinction between state, market, and civil society).
In most OECD countries, over the past few decades, understanding the role of migration and
migrants in modernizing the economy of competition states has been used to emphasize public
policies which attract highly skilled migrants. In general, the main focus has been on market liberal
principles, such as flexible labour markets and thus appropriate regulations to attract talent from
abroad. The underlying assumption has been that migrants with high amounts of human (i.e. cultural)
capital in future-oriented sectors of the economy, such as information technology, would contribute to
the fast-paced accumulation of capital and also create jobs. This goal has entailed easing the access
of highly skilled migrants to immigration countries and the sectors seeking this kind of labour (Bauder
2006). In addition, increasingly, as the market for international students has developed into a billion-
euro economic sector, there has been a scramble to attract future talent from BRICS countries and
elsewhere from the global South. In a sort of mirror image, countries of migrant origin have sought to
re-attract returnees. If this is not feasible, governments have sought to create networks of ‘their’
professionals abroad.
Accordingly, the public role of social scientists as experts in helping to modernize the economy in
countries experiencing immigration has been dominant. An example at hand is the Expert Council on
Migration (Sachverständigenrat) in Germany. It has propagated the need to establish a ‘welcome
culture’ for highly skilled migrants (cf. Kolb 2017) as part of the mobilization of labour reserves for a
competitive economy. Again, researchers dealing with countries of emigration deliver expert advice
on how to keep in touch with professionals and academics living abroad in the ‘diaspora’; hence, the
mushrooming cottage industry on ‘diaspora knowledge networks’ meant to mobilize the resources of
the highly skilled living abroad to the benefit of emigration societies, in the case of Columbia or
South Africa (J.-B. Meyer 2011), for example. Other roles played by social scientists are much less
pronounced, but include, for example, an advocacy role with respect to irregular migrants in the
construction and service sectors. In this case, Churches and NGOs have been instrumental in pushing
for basic rights of irregulars—for example, academics supporting the Catholic Forum on Life in
Illegality which has, among other issues, pushed for increased inclusion of irregular migrants in the
public health care system.5 These latter examples suggest the importance of decommodification of
labour through social rights as a counterweight to market liberalization.
The second crucial site where social scientists are involved is the governance of borders and
boundaries through the state, involving struggles over collective identity and issues of membership.
For example, states determine the conditions for regular residence and citizenship. In public policy,
governance is intricately related to economic modernization. A case in point is the efforts of the EU
and its member states to link remote control of cross-border mobilities to cooperation for the sake of
economic development. In other words, economic cooperation on the part of the EU hinges on the
willingness of states, for example in West and North Africa and the Middle East, to curtail the
movement of people toward Europe. The obvious limit to such efforts to link state control and
economic development and modernization is the absence of the monopoly of power over certain
territories, as observed in Libya and the Horn of Africa around 2010 and its aftermath. Yet, there is an
obvious counterproductive effect of exclusivist state control of borders and especially of struggles
over ethnic and religious boundaries: increasing securitization of migration could constitute one of the
factors that may contribute to xenophobic behaviour among native populations (Brochmann and
Hammar 1999), which, in turn, is detrimental to attracting highly skilled migrants from abroad.
Excessive securitization hampers attracting the best and brightest; and xenophobia certainly is not
conducive to harnessing migrants for increasing economic competitiveness. With respect to
governance, the public role of social scientists is not only that of expert but also of advocate. As to
the latter function, public statements are often found advocating admission policies based on human
rights standards (e.g. Lold, Mitchelson, and Burridge 2012), and integration policies based on
cultural pluralism. Moreover, in the public debates on how to respond to forced migrants knocking at
Europe’s doors, sociologists have acted as public intellectuals (e.g. Bauman 2016).
Some researchers with ambitions for societal impact place their hope on civil society and
advocate for sociology as an integral part of civil society (Burawoy 2005). In this perspective it is
societal transformation which occupies centre stage. The agenda of transformation includes yet
reaches much beyond cross-border migration. Some civil society actors pursue an agenda of open
borders and thus also of increased cultural diversity. Others, present at the GFMD, stress that
international institutions need to be reformed in order to create the foundations for fair migration.
Such demands also go along with changes in international, regional, national, and local institutions
enabling the rule of law, the observation of human rights, and calls for fundamental changes in the
world trade system, and also stricter regulation of financial flows.
Another exemplary case in which a transformation agenda is visible is climate change in
particular, environmental destruction in general, and migration. At times, there have been tensions
between civil society activists and migration researchers. It is interesting that environmental activists
in the early 2000s engaged in alarmist discourses, seeking to place the topic on the political agenda.
Citing high figures of categories alternately called environmental migrants or climate refugees,
environmental activists sought to alert the public to an impending massive danger by referring to
catastrophic scenarios. By contrast, migration scholars most often engaged in appeasing messages,
referring to the generally low rates of overall global migration and the fact that most forced migrants
are either IDPs or are hosted in neighbouring countries of the global South (cf. J. McAdam 2012).
As rigorous analysis suggests, both sides got it wrong. While it is true that most migration is multi-
causal and rarely relates to environmental degradation alone, it would be wrong to conclude that the
situation is simply business as usual. After all, as data clearly suggest, over the past years twenty
million to forty million persons (an overwhelming majority located in the global South) have been
displaced by disasters (Chapters 7 and 10). Their displacement can often be attributed to expulsion as
part of processes of capitalist penetration and destruction of habitat. In these contexts the hazards of
climate change occur in addition to such processes of capitalist accumulation as land grabbing
practices, extraction of raw materials, and waste disposal. In a nutshell, while dramatic scenarios
painted an apocalyptic picture of future cross-border migration of climate refugees, and migration
scholars emphasized that migration was proceeding more or less as usual, startling processes of
displacement have taken root—feeding upon the worst features of the transnationalized social and
ecological question. What is needed for the future is an imagination of mobility which sees it neither
as a social problem nor as a panacea celebrating resilience.
The three agendas to deal with present challenges—economic modernization, governance of
borders and boundaries, and societal transformation—overlap and interact with each other. Most
importantly, on the one hand the economic modernization agenda flatly contradicts the governance
agenda in that the former calls for increased mobility of carriers of high amounts of cultural capital
across borders while the latter is heavily engaged in restrictionist proposals and policies. On the
other hand, the governance and control aspect of the state constitutes the foundation for much-wanted
selective immigration, that is, admitting those economically wanted and culturally welcome, and
excluding those not wanted and not welcome (Chapter 8). The social transformation agenda, in turn,
calls into question both the economic modernization and the governance agendas. For example, social
movements have opposed the categorical exclusion of irregular migrants from social and labour
protection rules and have called for more liberal admission policies (for arguments along these lines,
see Moses 2006). This observation suggests that it is crucial which interpretations and meanings
social scientists attach to the facts unearthed in empirical research when communicating not only in
their own epistemic communities but also across the boundaries separating scientific and public
debates.

The Production of Orientation and Meaning

We are now able to return to the original question posed in the early part of this chapter: would social
science knowledge be more useful if it could be more easily applied instrumentally? In other words,
would we desire a state of affairs in which political action could be systematically based on
knowledge about calculable causal relations with respect to migration and social inequalities in the
context of welfare states and development states? The answer given here is a resounding no. There is
a difference between formal and material rationality, between instrumental rationality and reason
(Weber 1968 [1922]: 5–14). In other words, while knowledge about causal relations may make
political action more rational in a formal sense, it may also be put to service to engage in normatively
undesirable undertakings. Eventually, social scientific knowledge is welt-anschaulich (related to a
world view) and thus primarily has a function of producing orientation and meaning. These results
suggest going further and examining the role of social sciences beyond the realm of consultancy and
policy-making. While much ink has been spilled over the role of academics as experts in their roles
as consultants and advisers, less has been said about their role in the public sphere. Yet it is here that
their functions in providing patterns of orientation and meaning have potentially the strongest impact
—and, in the long run, influence political decisions and public policies.
These considerations imply at least three points to be heeded in discussing the transnationalized
social question. First, social scientists active in the field could see their role not primarily as
advising politicians but as entering into a dialogue with the public. This would mean that social
scientists seek to speak to varied audiences in the global North and South, not just the representatives
of government or civil society organizations. Second, social scientists need to engage in setting the
agenda of the debate, preferably by widening the scope and horizon of discussion. For example, the
migration–development nexus is intimately connected to the migration–security nexus by the
securitization of border control and control of financial flows across borders through state agents, and
also to post-migration issues of social integration and communal relations. Quite often, the rhetoric of
the migration–development nexus occludes the fact that certain migrant categories, such as asylum
seekers, are subject to restrictive coercion whereas others are not only wanted but also welcomed,
such as those in categories termed highly skilled or talented. It is the very selectivity of migration
policies which needs to be considered when calling into question overly simplistic win-win-win
situations, that is, gains for emigration countries, immigration countries, and the migrants themselves.
Third, social scientists are able to look behind the smoke and mirrors of ideological statements and
speak in no uncertain terms about the constructions in and of the policy field. For example,
remittances to development schemes are frequently presented as ideal types and model examples of
market or civil society solutions to economic and human development, with the point made that
migrants are their own best development agents. Such statements overlook the fact that states enable
mobility across borders in the first place, and that market or civil society solutions critically depend
upon a public infrastructure of enabling and controlling mobility of persons, remittances, and other
resources across borders. This also implies calling upon states in the global North and South to live
up to their responsibility for both residents within their borders and citizens outside.
The argument developed here fertilizes the dialogue between researchers from diverse academic
disciplines and beyond an academic audience, particularly emphasizing the importance of debates
based on reflexive migration knowledge. On this basis, it aims to offer an intellectual forum to raise a
critical European conscience on relevant topics related to migration, to enable broader debates in
society, and to promote a well-balanced European migration agenda, which embraces very different
voices, including those from academia, policy-makers at the EU and member state level, civil society,
the private sector, and the migrants themselves. The EU and its member states assume a critical role
in providing a frame used by other European states.
One necessary but not sufficient element to move towards a more comprehensive analysis is to
also take extra-European perspectives. For example, imperialism created a hegemonic context in
which the cultural predispositions and partialities of Western culture were adopted and
institutionalized on a global scale to shape the social, cultural, and political institutions of subjugated
peoples. After all, the formal end of European colonialism has not resulted in the abrogation of the
imperial legacy. Instead, hegemonic legacies continue to shape the cultural legacy of the metropolitan
imperial national states. Therefore, to continue productive deliberations on the transnationalized
social question, it would be fruitful to engage with scholars who recognize diverse perspectives
emanating from multiple societal and cultural contexts (e.g. Benda-Beckmann and Benda-Beckmann
1994). A prerequisite for productive ‘Southern perspectives’ in an overall dialogue is to conceive of
particular views as part of a universal endeavour to advance social standards. Equally important is
the recognition that social rights need a basis in communal relations which would be hard to
constitute on a global level.
In sum, the social sciences have a dual role (Lynd 1939). On the one hand, all the social sciences
are engaged with scientific specializations to be able to treat topics in a systematic and methodical
way. On the other hand, it is necessary to connect these specialized knowledge(s) with larger issues
concerning the common good. It is therefore of utmost importance to devote more attention to figuring
out how to connect specialized knowledge to questions of what embodies the constitution of a
common good. Such an approach could help to reinvigorate the vital link between insight into the
actual (aided by systematic research) and imagination of the possible. Structures of society are made
and imagined rather than just existing: the social world is a created world. The task is to explain the
ascendance of the present arrangements and underlying assumptions in a way that dissociates
explaining processes and outcomes from vindicating their necessity. This goal definitely is a first
element of an ambition to advance the public role of social science in addressing the
transnationalized social question. In the current context this means that the shape-shifting of the social
question from class-dominated political conflicts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a
more complex assemblage of heterogeneities, including social class, is traced systematically in order
to explore venues of possible change. Only then can we begin to address the issues around location-
specific inequalities between and within the global North and the global South.

Notes
1. http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/70/L.1%26Lang=E.
2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/.
3. Also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize: see http://www.rightlivelihoodaward.org/laureates/walden-bello-de/.
4. http://www.mipex.eu/.
5. www.forum-illegalitaet.de.
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Index

note: ‘f’ indicates a figure; ‘n’ indicates a footnote; ‘t’ indicates a table.

Afghanistan 3, 11, 74, 115, 178, 202n2, 235, 258

Africa 10, 24, 34–6, 68, 114, 127, 136, 147, 183–4, 254, 263
African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights 64n3
Central 198, 279
Eastern 47
Economic Union of West Africa (ECOWAS) 117
intra-African migration movement 184
Joint EU–Africa Strategy 198
migration to Europe 304
North 129, 135, 174, 179, 181, 225, 229, 242, 295, 307
partnership with the EU 199
South 47, 50, 97, 262, 306
sub-Saharan 70, 81, 84, 114, 131, 191, 242, 283
suffering from brain drain 192
West 79, 117, 174, 195, 198, 235, 239, 307
African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights 64n3
African organizations in Germany 200
age 14–15, 49, 56, 143, 158–9, 269, 281, 290, 303; see also heterogeneities
age, old
and social services offered by public and private organizations 4
care 142, 156, 169
pensions 144, 169
provision 147, 166
retirement schemes 107
ageing societies 99
Agenda for Sustainable Development 4
Alaska 281
Algeria 184, 193
American Convention on Human Rights 64n3
Amnesty International 178
Amsterdam 64n5, 92, 186
ancien régime 49
Annan, Kofi 121, 295
Anthropocene, geological age of the 304–6
anti-elite movement 222, 225
anti-globalization 56
anti-immigration feelings 210, 225
anti-Semitism 55
anti-system movement 225
Arabian Gulf 34
Argentina 87, 254
Armenia 202
Asia 47, 70, 136, 254, 265n1
Central 11, 45, 151, 235, 239
costs of migration have risen in 80
East 80, 247, 255
feminism in 147
gender-specific controls on the emigration of women across 199
mass movements occurred in 91
Migrant Forum 256
rise of 20
South 10, 78, 80, 91, 131, 199
Southeast 50, 68, 80, 91, 113, 127, 142, 147, 239, 246, 255
West 10
asylum seekers 8, 34, 50, 64, 108, 134, 138, 149, 159, 174, 178, 182–6, 201, 203n3, 213–15, 233(t), 235, 304, 310
bogus 149, 178, 186
Atlantic Charter 44
austerity politics 39, 69, 84, 207, 271
Australasia 68
Australia 40, 43, 46, 56, 69, 92, 97, 120, 136, 227, 246, 294
Azerbaijan 202

Bangladesh 81–2, 250, 274, 277, 303

Beauvoir, Simone de 186
Beck, Ulrich 7
Bello, Walden 302
Berlin Wall, fall of 109, 173
Berne Initiative 52, 119–21
Bismarck, Otto von 55, 100, 216
boomerang effect 176
border control 49, 87, 120, 138, 174, 177, 181, 184–5, 221, 241, 287, 291, 310
and cultural boundaries 7, 29
excessive, negative impact on trade relations and labour mobility 183
externalizing 184–5
Frontex (EU border control agency) 177
increased in wake of terrorist attacks 221
restrictive, around the Mediterranean 181
securitization of 241
borders
closed 118, 173, 288
EU 43, 103, 174, 177, 182, 295
function of 201
governance of 306–8
harmonized policies across 103
human-made 275
networks across 21
NGOs operating across 44
open 38, 70, 76, 87, 173, 179, 213, 217, 220, 287–8, 301, 307
operate socially as boundaries 13
political 260
securitized 184, 188, 210
self-employment across 129
social protection across 5, 27, 42, 107, 109, 129–32, 134–55, 161–2, 261
socioeconomic and political connectivity across 20
solidarity across 24
strengthened through system of passports and visas 17, 46
use of hard power selectively to enforce 86
Bouffier, Volker 234
boundaries 13–14, 33, 55, 58, 105, 154, 169, 225, 231–6, 290, 307–8
Bourdieu, Pierre 236, 301
La Misère du monde 301
brain circulation 84, 124, 188, 192–3, 202, 259
brain drain 52, 68, 75–9, 84, 119–24, 154, 188–93, 202, 244–9, 259
brain gain 84, 120, 124, 193, 202, 259
brawn drain 84, 151, 202, 244
Bremen 50
BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) 20, 306
Bulgaria 147, 215
Burawoy, Michael 220, 298–300
Butler, Judith 185

Cairo 119–20
Canada 69, 91–2, 136, 214, 227, 249, 294
Cape Verde 202
capitalism, predatory 68
Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reciprocal Agreement 130
Catholic Church 55, 228, 260
Catholic Forum on Life in Illegality 307
Central and Eastern Europe, post-communist regimes in 116
Césaire, Aimé 54
ceteris paribus 71, 79, 165, 255, 295
Chad 184
Chile 92, 114
China, People’s Republic of
does not tolerate dual citizenship 254
emerging middle class in 271
emerging-market growth in 20
emigration from 47
hukou system 53
increasing levels of income in 2
mobility of economic elites 91–2
private recruitment agencies in 246
reverse brain drain 192
slogan ‘serve the country’ 196
citizenship
access to 88, 118, 217
location as a proxy for 3
rights 41, 104, 128, 212, 253–4
civil war 3, 9, 70, 73, 187, 258, 271, 283
Syrian 187, 283
Clandestino project 137
class 19, 26, 56, 61, 159, 281, 303; see also heterogeneities
as signalling oppression 19
class conflict 17, 56–7, 207, 260
climate change and migration 270–80
climate refugees 86, 273, 282, 308
cognitive dissonance 181, 224
Cold War 7, 24, 97, 118, 152, 177, 180, 188–9, 202, 223, 241, 257–8, 265
Colombia 254, 262
colour, people of 12, 224
Combahee River Collective 19
Committee of Italians Abroad 103
Committee on Overseas Workers Affairs 302
commodities, fictitious 28, 39, 220, 271, 301
communism, collapse of 59
Communist Manifesto 19, 40–1, 259
commuters 159
Congo, Democratic Republic of 11, 115
consular services 240, 253
Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families 100, 109, 123
Coordination of Action Research on AIDS and Mobility 256
criminal violence and its impact on migration 73
cross-border life and comparisons 169–70
cross-border migration; see also migration
and inequalities 8–12, 65–96
and social protection 135–53
externalization in 173–203
implementation of social standards in 124–8
late consequence of European colonialism and imperialism 8
visible reflection of global inequalities 9, 65
cross-border mobility 3–4, 10, 45, 64n1, 66, 72–6, 83, 90, 128, 141–3, 147, 157, 164, 173–4, 243
cross-border social protection of migrants in the EU 141–52
cultural cohesion, perceived threats to 12
cultural distinctions 57, 220
cultural diversity 30, 33, 57, 63, 90, 205, 211, 233, 287
cultural heterogeneities, see heterogeneities
cultural inequalities 236–8
cultural issues, politicization of 58
cultural pluralism 5, 205–10, 220–38, 307
cultural rights 11, 19, 38, 44, 53–4, 57, 205–9, 227, 237
culturalization
and cultural rights 54
and racialization in Europe 210
and securitization 221, 228, 241, 287
and xenophobic populism 225
emigration 256–64
inescapable by-product of migration 58
membership and culturalization 240
mono-culturalization 228
of class in the field of migration 60–1
of conflicts 62
of heterogeneities 35
of high-skilled migrants 223
of migrants 16–18
securitization as culturalization 223
culturalized and securitized politics 205
culturalized homogenization 232
culture and the continued salience of class, increasing significance of 236–7

de-categorization 228, 232

Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work 44
de-commodification 5, 39, 63, 103, 205–13, 218, 220, 232, 236
de-hierarchization 228–32; see also hierarchization
democratization 35, 40, 75, 82, 113, 125, 192, 197, 258
and gender equality 75
 of world society 35
processes in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador 82
Department for International Development (DFID) 123
deportation regime 201
deregulation of markets 29, 180, 194
Deutsche Islam Konferenz (DIK) 228, 230, 295
Dhaka 122, 281, 303
diaspora 240–4
as shifting responsibility to migrants 264–5
development, diaspora, and membership 240–4
Diaspora Knowledge Networks 262
emigrant nation and diaspora, terms such as 256–64
formation 29, 292
heterogeneities and Diaspora organizations 265
Jewish 260
policy 103
socio-cultural dimension of 256–64
state–diaspora relationships 13
dichotomization 220, 226, 232
discriminated groups, persecution of 70
diversity management 231
diversity, cultural
and cultural rights for national minorities 38
consequences of the politics around 233
diversity management 35–6, 211, 231, 237
gender and diversity 292
implications for diversity 297
open borders and increased cultural diversity 307
resistance to growing cultural diversity 33
semantic of diversity in market-liberal thinking 236–7
Doaba region 81
Dominican Republic 82
dual citizenship 12, 132, 158–9, 196, 215–19, 227, 242, 253–5, 261–3
Dublin Convention 52, 64n5
Dublin Regulation 183, 203n3
Durkheim, Émile 24, 220, 272, 276
Division of Labour 272

Eastern bloc 20, 113, 242

Eastern Europe 24, 55, 59, 71, 113, 116, 129, 135, 142, 148, 151, 157, 174, 181, 242, 264
East–West conflict 242
economic elites 90–5, 222–3
cross-border mobility of 90–3
economic externalization of costs 183–7
economic inequalities 3, 65, 71, 77, 106, 238
economic nodes 92
economic refugees 178
economic sectors 92, 207, 271, 306
Economic Union of West Africa (ECOWAS) 117
El Niño 283
El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) 283
El Salvador 82, 250, 254
elevator effect 88–9, 136
Eley, Geoff 61–2
Elias, Norbert 300–1
emigrant nation and diaspora, terms such as 256–64
emigrants 12–13, 18, 75, 79, 94, 101, 141, 190, 238–44, 249–65
and accompanying brain drain 190
and tolerance 264
and transnationally oriented groups 239
cast as ‘traitors’ by emigration countries 12
citizenship, and political, civil, and social rights of 253
consular identification cards issued to 254
cross-border engagement on the part of 255
exert voices from abroad in their countries of origin 261
extension of citizen rights to 254
financial remittances of 244
highly educated and skilled 251, 259
integration of 262
loyalty of emigrants 12–13
narrative inclusion of 257
rights and duties of 258
shift from emigrants as ‘traitors’ to ‘our heroes abroad’ 263
social protection of 252–4
emigration 238–65
and return, politics around 261–4
control 199
culturalization of issues around immigration and 18
culturalizing 256–64
deleterious effects of 76
demographic challenges in 5
development aid in exchange for increased control of 174
different systems of stratification in 167
driven by deprivation 72
economic impact on the countries of origin 188
forced 3
politics of departure in 12
positively associated with inequality and exclusion in the country of origin 70
rights of states to restrict 45
social inequalities in 24
to Europe 78–85
to the Americas 71, 74
emigration countries 12–13, 25, 28, 52, 56, 65, 68, 73–82, 87, 161, 168, 171, 174, 179–80, 185, 190, 196, 204, 240–5, 250, 253, 257, 263,
265, 279, 290, 310
cast emigrants abroad as ‘traitors’ 12
class dimension in 241
economic development in 290
economic growth of 65
extended families in 82
high inequalities between emigration countries and immigration countries 74
labour scarcities in 190
religious minorities in 263
emigration regions
ageing population and a ‘surplus’ of labour in 211
and brain drain 190
and brain gain or brain circulation 124
and financial remittances 94, 151
and securitization 241
costs and benefits for 77
costs of immigration control pushed back to emigration regions 184
depopulation of 94
 development obstacles in 190
inequalities in 78
migration contributes to underdevelopment in 76
policies that increase inequalities within 69
social change in 242
to Europe 78–85
emigration societies 71, 306
employment rights 77, 135
Engels, Friedrich 19–20, 40
environmental degradation and disaster 70
environmentally displaced persons 273
essentialization 230, 232
ethnicity 1–14, 26, 35–9, 53–63, 73, 81, 85, 89, 94–5, 108, 114, 143, 159, 180, 204, 214, 218, 223, 238–9, 260–1, 269, 281, 291; see also
heterogeneities
ethnicity and gender 26, 94
ethno-nationalism 210, 241, 265
EURODAC (European Dactyloscopy) fingerprinting system 64n5, 177
European Border and Coast Guard Agency 137
European Border Surveillance System (Eurosur) 177
European borders
control of 137
growing securitization of 188
European Charter of Fundamental Rights 135
European citizenship 138
European colonialism and imperialism 8
European Commission 120, 130, 289, 291
European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms 64n3
European Council 50, 199
European Court of Human Rights 64n3
European Court of Justice (ECJ) 50, 64n3
European immigration laws 214
European model of national state formation 3
European policies on migration and citizenship 137–41
European Union (EU) 134–53
adopted GAMM, the successor to the Global Approach on Migration 199
and gender equality 125
anti-discrimination legislation 218
as transnationalized social space of social security 27
Blue Card 214
Border Agency (Frontex) 137, 177
citizens 133n1, 135, 141–5, 159
citizenship 112–13, 139–40
cross-border social protection of migrants in 141–52
enlargements of 25
EU–Turkey deal 182–3
High-Level Dialogue on Migration and Development 121–3
inequalities in migration to 136, 273
internal EU mobility 117
Joint EU–Africa Strategy 198
little authority in the realm of social policy and social rights 125
member states react to alleged threat of uncontrolled inflows of asylum seekers 201
migrants from Poland 161
mobility partnerships 199, 295
mobility rights 139
new accession countries 215
 non-EU citizens 135
partnership with the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries 199
policies 177, 180, 198
pre-EU accession aid 246
reintroduced border controls in response to refugee crisis 138
securitization as remote control 279
social policy 21, 63, 98, 105, 112–13, 125, 140, 213
supranational welfare regime in the 42
supranationalization of the social question in the 63
temporarily suspended the Dublin Regulation 138
European Values Study 232
Europeanization 182, 216–18, 288
Eurostars 78, 216
exclusion 143–5
exemptionalism 276
exo-polity 259
expansive labour immigration policies 210
expatriates 254, 260
Expert Council on Migration 306
exploitation 150–2
expulsion 70, 150, 235, 308

Fair Globalization: Creating Opportunities for All 121

fair migration 120, 239, 247, 301, 308
Faso, Burkina 72
Federal Constitutional Court 48
female migrants 81, 146, 150
feminist movements 56
feminist theory 185
feminization of migration 197
fictitious commodities 28, 39, 220, 271, 301
Filipino workers 248, 263
First World War 11, 17, 34, 37, 39, 41, 46, 48, 173
food sovereignty 33, 56
fortification and restriction, policies of 173–4
Foucault, Michel 61, 86
France, co-développement scheme in 192, 198
free market, myth of the 39
Frontex 137, 177
Fukuyama, Francis 177

Galbraith, John Kenneth 65, 197

gap hypothesis and its deficiencies 294–6
gender 26, 49, 53, 56, 57, 61, 143, 158, 159, 162, 204, 218, 260, 269, 281, 290, 303; see also heterogeneities
and Diaspora organizations 265
and diversity 292
and ethnicity 53, 57–8, 94
and implications of migration 81
and migration 35
and new social movements 53
and non-state persecution 117
and opportunity hoarding 146
and provision of support 162
as culturally defined heterogeneity 82, 89, 95, 143, 158–9, 204, 218, 269, 290–1, 303
 as signalling oppression 19
as socially constructed identities 186
associated with low-skilled work 148–50
differences 56
equality 36, 75, 125, 189, 192, 224
feminization of migration 197–9
gender-associated roles 89, 129
gender-specific controls on the emigration of women 199
gender-specific division of 153, 165–6
inequality 82, 150
intersection of class and gender 281
new complex forms of 94
pre-existing models of 185
recognition of 63
roles 129, 162
structures 84
Western ideas of democracy and gender equality 189
General Declaration of Human Rights 43
generalized reciprocity 43, 156–7, 163
Geneva Convention 21, 52, 86, 109–10, 117–18, 178–83, 187, 202n2
Geneva Refugee Convention 178, 282
Georgia 202
German Reich, Polish migrants to 55
German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) 123
Germany
accepts over one million refugees 217
activities of African organizations 200
agreement between state and Church (Konkordat) 228–9
change of laws to include citizens abroad as members of the nation 257
changing semantics around immigrants 204, 231
contract-worker programmes legitimized as pre-EU accession aid 245–6
debates over ethno-national understandings of nationhood 215
discursive ranking of cultures 234
distinction between ‘deserving’ and illegitimate migrants 187
ever-increasing demand for skilled health care workers 248
expelled thousands of Jews to Russia 55
Expert Council on Migration (Sachverständigenrat) 306
fair migration and the ‘Triple Win Project’ 247–9
German Federal Statistical Office 231
Germany–Kazakhstan 27, 113, 159
Germany–Poland 27, 159, 166–8
Germany–Turkey 27, 159–60, 166
Green Card Initiative 214
guest-worker recruitment 213
hierarchization of migrant categories 149
human capital selection systems in 214
integration of guest-worker groups who arrived in the 1960s and 1970s 233–4
interviews with migrants in 160
Islam as part of the contemporary German cultural landscape 234
Islamic organizations and push for inclusion in corporatist structure 228
Jews from Eastern Europe (Ostjuden) in 55
Kazakh re-settlers 168
Kurdish activists in 264
management of humanitarian migration 201
multicultural policies 228, 231
number of irregular migrants in 303
nursing shortage 247
 PEGIDA movement 226
Persons with a Migration Background (PMB) 231
played crucial role in recent enlargements of the EU 25
Polish migrants in 161, 164, 168
Polish–German transnational space 168
recognition of former guest-workers as permanently settled 297
recruitment of guest workers in 48
securitization of culture focused on religion 224
state-provided social protection in 168
strikes by labour migrants in 219
subcontract-worker schemes in 94
transnational social protection spaces Germany–Kazakhstan 113
Turkish migrant women in 165
welfare state arrangements in 166
Global Approach to Migration and Mobility (GAMM) 137, 182, 199, 202
global cities 78, 92
Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel by the World Health Organization (WHO) 130, 248
Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) 52, 121
Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) 122
global inequalities, internalization of 200–2
global migration regime 117–24
global nation, -s 12, 238–65
Global Peace Index 3
global warming 273, 275, 278, 283
globalization 33, 37–42, 51, 90, 127, 193–4, 222
and transnationalization 75–8
anti-globalization 56
counterhegemonic globalization 56
de-globalization 37, 41
globalization and transnationalization 75–85
market-dominated globalization 128
migrants blamed because they are visible signs of globalization 222
neo-liberal globalization 94
Southern Initiative on Globalization and Trade Union Rights 60
threats of globalization 208, 211, 222
World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization 121
Golden Day gatherings of Turkish migrant women in Germany 165
Great Transformation, The 271; see also Polanyi, Karl
Greece 104, 136, 178, 183, 233, 264
Green Card Initiative 214
guest-worker, -s 55, 136, 213–14, 233–4, 245–7, 297
Gulf Council 255
Gulf States 68, 78, 117

habitat, loss of 6, 70, 288

Hamburg 50
Hamburg Archive for World Economy 303
Hayek, Friedrich von 63, 220
heterogeneities 1, 6, 12–15, 26, 38, 39, 56–8, 61–3, 73, 143, 158–9, 204, 218, 223–4, 230, 269, 281, 290, 303
according to which categorizations and inequalities are (re)produced 61
and inequalities, meaning of 167–9
conflicts around 39
cultural 6, 13–14, 31, 35, 39, 53–62, 204, 208, 223, 228–32, 236–7
growing political relevance of 26
important 224
 increasing relevance of 53–9
inequalities, and social mechanisms 12–16
involved in making boundaries between people 15
politicized 58
hierarchization 27, 135, 143, 147–9, 163–5, 215, 220, 223, 226–8, 232, 247, 288–9
de-hierarchization 228–32
of migrants 149
within families 165
High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development 121–3
hometown associations 5, 18, 102, 197, 244
homogeneity, national 210, 225
homogenization, culturalized 232
Honduras 254
Hong Kong 254–6
hospitality, right to 104
human capital 21, 29, 49, 80, 136, 206–9, 214, 216, 219, 232, 235, 243–4, 254, 262
selection systems 214–16
Human Resources Development Recommendation 100
human rights 22–4, 33–6, 43, 49–53, 60, 75, 87–8, 100, 109–10, 118–32, 167, 176–87, 208–13, 217–20, 235–7, 246, 253, 258, 263–5,
280–2, 300, 307–8
African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights 64n3
American Convention on Human Rights 64n3
and forced migration flows 18
as moral obligation 180
basic human rights of migrant workers and their families 124
emphasis on 49
European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms 64n3
European Court of Human Rights 64n3
exploitation and denial of human rights for migrants 52
extension of human rights to migrants 29
failure of human rights governance 176
General Declaration of Human Rights 43–4
growing importance of 49
Human Rights, General Declaration of 43
Inter-American Court of Human Rights 64n3
irregular migrants in precarious human rights situation 120
migrant social rights as human rights 206
packaged with social rights 48
Peoples Global Action on Migration, Development, and Human Rights 122
securitization vs. human rights 45–53
social rights as human rights 125, 209, 217–20
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 46, 64n3, 109, 118, 126, 175, 178–9
universal recognition of 43–5
universality of 126
humanitarian aid 105
humanitarian migration 67, 137, 180, 201
humanitarian principles, violation of 201
hundi system 80
Hungary 139, 246
extending citizenship to co-ethnics in Serbia 139
hybridity 12

identities, politics of 13, 58

identity issues 36, 56
ideology, nationalist 55
immigrants
as economic (and cultural) threats 90
perceived as economic and/or cultural competitors 223
immigration
beneficial to long-term economic growth 89
colonial 55
immigration control
costs of 184
nationalism and 107
restrictive 34
welfare state 17
immigration countries 204–37
immigration regions in Europe 85–90
immigration sceptics 180
impacts of immigration on wage and employment rates 89
imperialism 8, 11, 61, 106, 310
age of 11, 55
theories of 106
income inequality
between poor and rich countries 45, 69
global 2, 14–15
within national states 20
Independent Commission on In-Migration 299
India
caste-based discrimination in 97
Eastern Punjab 72, 81
economic growth in 207
emerging middle class in 271
emerging-market growth in 20
emigration from 47
increasing levels of income in 2
Indian immigrants in South Africa 50
Indian information technology industry 83
internal rural–urban migration in 80
ministry of migration and tourism 240
skilled workers from 247
‘Indian Case’, the, of the Federal Constitutional Court 48
industrialization and urbanization, age of 242
inequalities
and legal status 145–7, 161, 165, 281
and social mechanisms 12–16
and social protection in migration 104–10, 134–53
as outcomes of migration 74–90
between emigration countries and immigration countries 74
categorical 14, 280–2
cross-border migration and 65–96
cultural 236–8
economic 3, 65, 71, 77, 106, 238
gender-based 82, 150
global 9, 65, 200–2
heterogeneities, inequalities, and social mechanisms 12–20
in emigration and immigration contexts 93–6
in emigration regions 69, 78
in life chances 10, 27, 143–4
in social protection 97–170
in the European Union 134–53, 273
 income 2, 14–15, 20, 45, 69, 75
migration and 8–12, 70
persisting 152–3
politicization of 5, 17
politico-economic 282
reinforcing durable inequalities 95–6
reproduction of social inequalities in emigration/immigration contexts 93–5
role of transnationality 157–66
shaping migration 67–74
social 24, 65–96, 280–2
socio-economic 4, 95
integration 5, 9, 41, 49, 57, 61, 65, 112–13, 121, 137–40, 149, 187, 196, 200–19, 224–37, 253, 259, 262, 287–9, 291–310
Inter-American Court of Human Rights 64n3
Inter-Governmental Consultations on Asylum, Refugees and Migration Policies in Europe, North America and Australia 120
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 272
International Agenda for Migration Management 120
International Centre for Migration Policy Development 120
International Conference on Population and Development 119
International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families 100, 109, 123
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 44, 64n3, 126
International Covenant on Social and Economic Rights 44, 126
International Crisis Group 73
International Labour Conference 150
International Labour Organization 44, 150
International Migrants Alliance 185
International Migration and Development, High-Level Dialogue on 121–3
International Migration, Global Commission on 52, 121
International Monetary Fund 29, 40, 101, 114–15, 127, 193, 203n5
International Organization for Migration 51, 87, 120, 123, 174–6, 182, 193, 199
International Peasant Movement 60
internationalism 57, 60, 88, 259–60
internationalist movements 55
intra-African migration 184
Inuit 281
Iran 178, 259
Iraq 3, 11, 115, 202n2, 235, 259
Islam 12, 33, 57–8, 182, 223–30, 234, 260, 263–4, 294; see also Muslim, -s
and securitization of culture 224–5
debate on the inclusion of 228
Deutsche Islam Konferenz (DIK) 230
France 229
fundamentalism 33
in Europe 12, 57–8, 229, 291
inclusion into the corporatist system 230
internationalists 260
Islamic solidarity 182
organization Milli Görüs 264
part of contemporary German cultural landscape 234
politicized 58
populist responses to 226
public debates on migration and 58
religious politics around 263
sexuality and 223
Israel 92, 260
Italian citizenship 139
Italians Abroad, Committee of 103
Italy 45, 114, 136, 139, 143–4, 195, 227, 252–3, 257
asylum seekers in 183
Italian citizenship 139
job opportunities for East European citizens in 148
naturalization processes in 139
Romanian migrants in 81, 143–4
Itzigsohn, José 83, 251

Jews, Jewish
collective rights 228–9
community 228–9
diaspora 260
expelled from Germany to Russia 55
Ostjuden 55
Joint EU–Africa Strategy 198
Jordan 66, 156
Justice, Theory of 105–7

Kant, Immanuel 104, 299

Kapital, Das 269
Kazakhstan 27, 113, 159–69
Keynes, John Maynard 292
Keynesian welfare state 48, 208, 219
Keynesianism, shift from 70
kinship groups 27, 100, 102, 110, 131, 147, 160, 163, 165–6, 261, 296
knowledge and its uses in public policy 302–9
knowledge production 298–302
Korea, South 92, 113, 192, 246
Kuhn, Thomas S. 299
Kulturkampf (culture war) 55
Kurds 259

labour markets, flexible 77, 217, 306

labour migrants 8, 13, 17, 37, 83, 88–9, 108, 117–19, 124, 131, 134–7, 144, 147–50, 158–9, 207, 211, 215, 219, 233, 243, 262–3, 288–9
labour migration 2, 17, 47, 67, 95, 110, 117–18, 121, 129, 142, 176, 192, 214, 239, 248, 255
labour, division of 113, 299
division of labour between men and women 150, 153, 165
Durkheim’s Division of Labour 24, 272
new international division of labour 95
Latin America 36, 68, 70, 114, 127, 147, 250, 254, 257
Lebanon 66, 178
legal status
and EURODAC fingerprinting system 177
effect on inequalities in terms of resources 145
effect on inequalities with respect to transnationality 165
characteristic categories of, for migrants 158
connected to inequalities in climate-induced migration 281
differentiations of, among migrants 165
family and friendship ties more important than 254
important for inequalities 161
irregular, migrants with 150
legal status, regular and irregular 288
limitations of, in understanding inequalities 147
 obtaining papers to acquire 157
of migrants in the USA 224
lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer (LGBTQ) movements 56
liberal paradox, the 29, 34, 75, 87, 118, 179, 201, 204–5, 208(t), 209, 211, 221
liberalism, embedded 41, 212–13
Libya 184, 304, 307
life chances
allocation according to legal citizenship 105
and access to social protection 168
and climate changes 280
and EU citizenship 144
and fragmented social spaces 154
and transnationality 158
cross-border migration as a strategy to better 241
disparities in 18, 51, 135
equality as a central prerequisite for evaluating 169
implications for 23
importance of location 3–9, 34, 36, 47, 100, 124–5, 217
migration as a proactive strategy aimed at improving 278
persistent inequalities in 10
resource distribution makes a difference for 15, 36
shifting the risks for 63
social class and the distribution of 60
social risks that might impede the realization of 99
state-provided protection as factor for improving life chances 161
transnational inequalities of income and 75
unequal distribution of 27, 143–4
widely divergent 42
location
as proxy for citizenship 3
importance of 2–6, 26, 34–6, 217

Malaysia 82
market, the, and transnational civil society 196–200
market liberalism 21, 37–9, 232, 272, 304
market liberalization
advocates more open borders 220
and debates on migration and development 238–9
and de-commodification 212–20
and Europe 103
and individual (social) rights 209
and massive transnationalization 193
and national welfare state 212
and NGOs 189
and open immigration policies 206
and rise of a resource-based approach 237
and role of individual rights 219
and securitization 224
and securitization are intricately interrelated 210
and supremacy of the free market 140
as a basis for class distinctions among migrants 236
as crucial basis for class distinctions 220
climate change and 275
decommodification of labour through social rights as counterweight to 307
de-commodification, the rights revolution, and securitization 206–12
displays economically nationalist tendencies 215
 economic divisions characterized by 28
extreme form of 207
failure to garner sustained growth 202
global social and economic space as a result of 21
immigration contexts around 5
impact on political economy 239
in the EU 216
neo-liberal globalization via 94
politics around 261
radical 29
ranking along class lines in 232
rapidly increasing 39, 90
strong push towards 35
tensions around 205, 208–10, 243
Marshall, T. H. 41, 88, 103, 112, 127, 132, 272
Marx, Karl 9, 19–20, 39–40, 56, 59, 61, 70, 143, 185, 269, 271, 276, 283–4
Matthew’s Law 80
meta-issues 90, 208, 225, 232, 292
Mexico 71–2, 82, 152, 197, 241, 246, 257
Meyer, J. W. 23, 107, 176
Meyer, J.-B. 192, 262, 306
Middle East 11, 16, 24, 34, 68, 82, 135, 174, 179, 213, 225, 239, 242, 260, 295, 307
migrant associations 82, 152, 195, 226, 239, 242, 251, 253, 256, 262, 305
Migrant Forum 256
migrant integration and social cohesion, implications for 232–5
Migrant Workers and Other Overseas Filipinos Resource Centre 103
migrant, definition of the term 8
MIGRANTE International 256
migrants
depicted as culturally deficient 19
from Kazakhstan 161
hierarchization of 149
highly skilled 13, 48–9, 67–71, 78, 84, 89, 103, 108, 116, 124, 136–8, 149, 193, 202, 207, 213–17, 233–4, 244–6, 257, 262, 288–9, 306–7,
310
labour 8, 13, 17, 37, 83, 88–9, 108, 117–19, 124, 131, 134–7, 144, 147–50, 158–9, 207, 211, 215, 219, 233, 243, 262–3, 288–9
Polish migrants to the German Reich 55
prone to poverty, under-employment, and unemployment 135
Romanian 81, 143–4
socio-legal hierarchy between various types of 135
transit 86
visible signs of globalization 222
migration
age of 26
and citizenship, European policies on 137–41
and development 13, 190–5, 286, 290
as meta-issue 90, 208, 225, 232, 292
as transnationalized social question 1–30
circular 8, 57, 192, 246
climate change and 270–5
colonization-driven 11
cross-border 8–12, 65–96, 124–8, 135–53, 173–203
dynamics, endogeneity of 67
feminization of 197
forced, violent conflicts as causes of 271
implementation of social standards in cross-border 124–8
industrialization-driven 11
 inequalities and social protection in 104–10
labour migration 2, 17, 47, 67, 95, 110, 117–18, 121, 129, 142, 176, 192, 214, 239, 248, 255
Migration and Development, Global Forum on 122
Migration and Mobility, Global Approach to 137, 182, 199, 202
Migration Compact and the New Partnership Framework 182
Migration for Employment Convention 109
Migration, Expert Council on 306
Migration, Global Approach on 199
migration–development–control nexus 188–200
migration–security nexus 177, 302, 309
political economy of 245–9
pressure 183
regime, global 117–24
social protection and inequalities in the European Union 134–53
theories 67, 272, 278
to the EU 136, 273
voluntary 36, 45, 70, 73, 119, 278
migration control
and consequences for the social protection of migrants 185
and humanitarian responses 178
and right-wing populism 187
building up the infrastructure for 184
developed concomitantly with state formation 73
development cooperation in exchange for 188, 193, 198–9, 304
economic externalization of 175, 179
effective means of 68
emergence of sophisticated state migration control 26
expansion of migration control 31
externalization of 175–6, 184–5, 204, 221, 239, 295
from a global point of view 176
in countries of origin 241
institutionalized migration control 11
internalization of 201
internationalization of 175
legal–institutional framework of 174
outsourcing of 182
practices 174
restrictive 38
securitization vs. human rights 45–53
since the First World War 34
social closure against migrants through migration control 67
transnational architecture of migration control 28
trumps considerations on social protection 100
Millennium Development Goals 290
Milli Görüs 264
mobility, global hierarchy of 13
mobility, internal EU 117
mobility partnerships 199, 295
Moldavians, access to Romanian citizenship 139
Moldova 202, 250
mono-culturalization and securitization 228
moral polity 175–9, 181
Morocco 193, 202
multiculturalism 19, 35, 39, 53, 57–9, 223, 227–8, 234, 287, 294, 301, 306
Multiculturalism Policy Index 227
Multilateral Framework on Labour Migration 129
Muslim, -s; see also Islam
and Islamic solidarity discourse 182
animosity toward 232
categorization of 16, 228, 230, 234
compatibility of Muslim immigrants with liberal values 224
migration from Muslim countries into Europe 180
Muslim organizations 229–30, 300
umma (worldwide community of Muslim believers) 260
Zakat (Muslim charity) 104

national homogeneity 210, 225

national unity, politics of 209
national welfare states 4, 7, 26, 34, 37–50, 56, 103, 107, 129, 135, 141, 179, 193, 207, 222, 225
nationalist ideology 55
nationalist-populist rhetoric 237
nationalist-protectionist trade and currency policies 210, 225
nativist and populist opposition to migration 18
naturalization procedures 139, 289
Négritude movement 54
neo-liberalism 29, 194, 207
Neolithic age 301
Netherlands, the 91–2, 96, 136, 144, 184, 195, 213, 237n2, 264, 294
New Economics of Labour Migration theory, the 67, 71, 84, 128, 153, 278–9, 296
New York Protocol 178, 209
Nield, Keith 61–2
Nietzsche, Friedrich 189
Niger 184, 304
non-EU citizens 135
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 33, 44, 73, 102(f), 104, 107–8, 115, 125–7, 174–6, 182–3, 187–9, 196–9, 247, 252–8, 262, 301–7
non-refoulement principle 109, 118, 175, 178, 184
North America 10–11, 40, 43, 46–7, 53–6, 68, 89, 97, 120, 125, 136, 186, 215, 233, 265n1
North American Free Trade Agreement 125

OECD Guidelines for Multinational Companies 44

old age
and social services offered by public and private organizations 4
care 142, 156, 169
pensions 144, 169
provision 147, 166
retirement schemes 107
opportunity hoarding 146–7
oppression, mechanism of 16
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 7, 10, 24, 41, 44, 48, 57, 68–9, 79, 85, 91, 95, 104, 108, 110–11, 116, 127, 134,
136, 142, 177, 191, 202, 207, 214–15, 280, 288, 302, 306
orientation and meaning, production of 309–11
Overseas Workers Welfare Administration 263

Pakistan 178, 254

Paris Climate summit 284
passport regime introduced in Europe 55
pastoral power, Foucaultian notion of 86
PEGIDA movement 226
people of colour 12, 224
Peoples Global Action on Migration, Development, and Human Rights 122
Persons with a Migration Background 231
Peru 254
Philippine Overseas Employment Administration 248, 263
Poland 27, 98, 142, 147, 159–68, 246
Polanyi, Karl 21, 28, 39, 48, 62, 127, 220, 271
identified three fictitious commodities 271
‘myth of the free market’ 39
Polish Catholic Church 55
Polish citizens, mobility of 164
Polish migrants to the German Reich 55
Polish–German social space 164
political economy of remittances and social protection 249–52
political refugees 18
politico-economic inequalities 282
politico-legal externalization 182–3
politics, culturalized and securitized 205
polity, world, as a moral polity 175–9
populism 21, 38, 187, 205, 207, 210, 220, 225, 232
anti-minority 210
right-wing xenophobic 210
xenophobic 207, 210, 225
populist responses to cultural pluralism 226
post-communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe 116
post-nationalism 35
post-Second World War period 136
Programme for International Student Assessment 216
Protestant Churches 228, 260
public policy
and research, confluence of 296–8
knowledge and its uses in 302–9
public sphere 59, 82, 287–311

queer theory 185

race 19, 53, 57–8, 61, 73, 143, 214, 224, 269, 303; see also heterogeneities
among the most important heterogeneities 224
as signalling oppression 19
mixed 12
prominence of 53
racialization 143, 148, 210, 225
Rawls, John 105–7
re-categorization 228, 230, 232
refugee, -s
camps 117, 182
climate 86, 273, 282, 308
crisis 187
resistance to refugee intake in most European states 179
regulations, assemblage of 128–31
religion 1, 6, 9, 12–14, 17, 36–9, 53, 56, 58, 61–3, 73, 143, 194, 204, 214, 218, 223–30, 239, 269, 281, 290–1; see also heterogeneities
and conflicts around cultural issues 17
and political struggles over the issue of cross-border migration 13
and public debates on migration in Europe 58
as focus for securitization of culture 224
as liberal criteria 214
 as main axis of immigrant integration politics and policy 230
as rallying differences in political debates around social inequalities 14
‘civil religion of development’, criticism of 194
constitutional law on 229
culturalization of 223
growing political relevance of 26
increasing plurality of 38–9
increasing political salience of 204
one of the most contested fields in Europe 226–8
overlap of socio-economic position with 225
public debates around 291
religious freedom and representation in public life 228
religious freedom 36, 228–9
religious stereotypes 55
reproduction of social inequalities in emigration and immigration contexts 93–6
resource distribution 15, 36, 38, 59
reverse remittances 80, 157, 161
rights
employment 77, 135
human, see human rights
revolution, consequences of 228–32
rights-based development 253–6
social, see social rights
right-wing
movements 95, 225
political parties 180
Romania 10, 81, 139, 143–4, 147, 215
Romanian migrants 81, 143–4
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 96

Schengen Area 138

seasonal workers 147, 159
Second World War 3, 7, 26, 29, 37, 43–7, 50, 89, 97, 109, 125, 136, 163, 213
securitization 5, 29, 38, 45, 62, 90, 109, 120, 124, 175, 184–5, 188, 200–10, 220–44, 255, 261, 264, 274, 279, 287, 291, 307–9
and culture 220–32
as culturalization 223
easily turns into xenophobia 223
Sen, Amartya 15, 107
Senegal 51, 82, 180, 193, 235, 251, 304
Senegalese migrant associations in France 82
Senghor, Leopold 54
sexual orientation 12, 53, 56, 158, 218, 260; see also heterogeneities
Shanghai 281
Sierra Leone 115
Sikhs 259
social boundaries 13–15
social citizenship, concept of 41, 88, 99, 103, 107, 112, 125, 128, 132, 137, 213, 272
social closure 6, 11–12, 26, 34, 37–8, 42–6, 61, 67, 69, 73, 77, 87, 105, 143, 165, 212–13
Social Covenant 44
social inequalities, see inequalities
social instability 33
social mobility 15, 26, 65, 73, 89, 95, 99, 167, 199, 281, 289
social norms 45, 99
social policy
 EU social policy 21, 63, 98, 105, 112–13, 125, 140, 213
global social policy 97–8, 112, 125
pro-inclusion social policy 213
social policy and civil society 194–5
transnational social policy 24
social protection
among small groups in European transnational social spaces 154–70
assemblages of 100–4
in small groups 155–7
in the world, four fragmented spaces of 110–17
informal 101
of emigrants 252
strategies of migrants 161
social question
changing 37–40
political mobilization around 59–62
politics around the 171–265
then and now 33–64
social rights
and social standards in cross-border migration 99–133
as human rights 217–20
social sciences and the public sphere 291–3
social status 13, 72, 80, 91–3, 148, 250, 255
Socialist International 57, 59–60
socialist movement, First and Second International of the 59–60
socialist theory 39, 58, 61
socio-cultural processes 244
socio-economic and cultural issues 204
socio-economic inequalities 4, 95
socio-legal hierarchy between various types of migrants 135
socio-natural question 269–85
socio-psychological externalization 179–82
Somalia 3, 74, 115, 202
Sombart, Werner 284
South Africa 50, 97, 262, 306
South Korea 92, 113, 192, 246
Southeast Asia 50, 68, 80, 91, 113, 127, 142, 147, 239, 246
Southern Europe 55, 72, 113–14, 147–51
Southern Initiative on Globalization and Trade Union Rights 60
Soviet Union (USSR) 47, 241
Spanish Guardia Civil in migration control in Senegal 51
state legitimacy, loss of 210
state–diaspora relationships 13
statehood and civil society 195–6
Sudan 11, 202, 304
supranational agencies 193
supranational entities 17, 20–4, 42–3, 60–1, 88, 103, 110, 125, 129, 137–8, 155, 173–4, 178, 199–202, 263; see also European Union
supranational policies 6, 27, 97, 138, 175
supranational regulation 52, 101, 158, 216
supranational rules 100–3
supranational version of citizenship 138
supranational welfare regime in the EU 42
supranationalization of the social question in the EU 63
Sustainable Development, Agenda for 4
Sustainable Development Goals 290
Sweden 71, 92, 226–9, 238, 264, 294
Switzerland 91–2, 96n1, 136, 223, 227, 289
Syria, -n 3, 11, 66, 115, 117, 178, 181–2, 187, 202, 235, 259, 274, 283
civil war 66, 187, 283
refugees 66, 117, 178, 181–2

Taiwan 113, 192, 254

Tampere summit 199
Therborn, Göran 16, 65, 93, 143
What does the Ruling Class do When it Rules? 143
Third World 194
Thirty Years War 46
3D jobs for migrants (dirty, dangerous, difficult) 209
tolerance 12, 106, 196, 205, 233, 264
toleration 219, 227, 233(t), 235, 262
of dual citizenship 219, 227
transit migrants 86
transnationalized social question
approaching the 31–98
discursive construction of 287–90
public role of social scientists in understanding 286–311
toward the 17–20
trans-Saharan migration 184
Triple Win Project 247–9
Truman, Harry 188
Tunisia 193, 202
Turkey 27–8, 66, 92, 98, 117, 144, 149, 152, 159–83, 190, 193, 225, 229, 240, 245–6, 257, 259, 264
Turkish migrants 161

Ukraine 193
underdevelopment and migration—poverty and the brain drain 191–2
United Nations 4, 43, 66, 107, 108, 176, 193, 295, 304
United Nations Development Programme 43, 193, 197
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation 108
United Nations Global Compact 44, 126
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 3, 66, 104, 117, 120, 123, 175–6, 182, 209, 282
United Nations Millennium Development Goals 101
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 123
United Nations, Civil and Social Covenants of the 44
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 44, 46, 64n3, 109, 118, 126, 175, 178–9
USSR, see Soviet Union

Values Study, European 232

Venezuela 114
Villacrés, Daniela 83, 251
voluntary migration 36, 45, 70, 73, 119, 278
voting rights 240, 253, 261

war, civil 3, 9, 70, 73, 187, 258, 271, 283

Weber, Max 9, 42, 55, 89, 104, 107, 143, 204, 236, 284, 296, 309
Protestant Ethic 236
welfare chauvinism 41, 57, 210, 224–5
welfare paradox 28, 87, 174, 179–80, 187, 204–13
welfare state model 43
welfare states 4, 7, 26, 34, 37–50, 56, 103, 107, 117, 129, 135, 141, 179, 193, 207, 222, 225
from exploitation to exclusion 40–5
West Africa 34, 79, 117, 174, 184, 195, 235, 239
Economic Union of West Africa 117
West, era of low economic growth in the 207
workers, seasonal 147, 159
workers’ movements 5, 40, 55, 60
World Bank 29, 115, 123, 127–8, 193, 197–8, 203nn4–5, 237, 249–50, 279, 289, 303, 305
World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization 121
World Health Organization 130, 192, 248
World Health Organization Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel 130, 248
world polity as a moral polity 175–9
World Social Forum on Migration 33, 60, 122
World Trade Organization 115, 123–7, 175
World Water Council 270
Wulff, Christian 234

xenophobia
and populism 207, 210, 225
and racist discourse 95
and securitization 223, 237, 307
rise of 11, 207

Yugoslavia 213

Zakat 104
Zweig, Stefan 173