Abstract
In recent years, migration has gained prominence not only in government policy agendas but also in scholarship. Far from being new, migration has historically shaped the evolution of societies worldwide. Migration matters less for the number involved–an estimated 214 million people representing 3.1% of the world’s population (UN 2008) are international migrants–but rather for its impact in the rise of multiethnic societies within nation-state borders. Even those places which ten years ago boasted homogeneous populations–Japan or Korea, for example–are increasingly being forced to come to terms with the reality of ethnic minority workforces (Castles and Davidson 2002: 157). Furthermore, changing geopolitics, a globalised production regime and the lure of political stability, democratic freedoms and comparatively high standards of living in Western states have all resulted in larger flows of migrants around the globe in general, and towards industrialised nations in particular, thereby exacerbating changes in dynamic growing societies.
We have already learned much about the mechanisms that drive and sustain migration thanks to a vast migration literature (Castles and Miller 2009, Massey et al 1998, Massey and Taylor 2004, Hirschman et al 1999 and Phillips 2011) which emphasises micro and macro explanations of international and internal migration. However, our understanding of the processes of migration, and how it is changing our conceptions of the local, the global and the role of the state, is still far from complete. At the same time, migration brings into focus notions of belonging and membership, challenging the privileged outcomes …